


A Monstrous Thing

by xxSparksxx



Series: And Then There Were Two [11]
Category: And Then There Were None (TV 2015)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Blood and Injury, F/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-20 23:47:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14904479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxSparksxx/pseuds/xxSparksxx
Summary: She has to find a lie. The awareness of that drifts through her mind, between sharp twists and jabs of pain. She needs to find a story to tell. If she survives this, if she has not lost too much blood, if Philip comes back and finds her…oh God, she thinks, if Philip finds her like this, there’s no telling how he’ll react. She needs a lie, but it’s hard to think, hard to concentrate.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the culmination of a number of threads I have been weaving through the whole series so far. It’s a story I’ve been building up to telling, one I'm proud of but very nervous about. 
> 
> Thank you to mmmuse for hand-holding and beta-reading. 
> 
> Please note! This fic discusses and deals with a subject that some may find triggering. To avoid spoiling readers, I have not included that subject in the tags. If you want to know what the subject is before reading, please scroll right down to the bottom of this chapter, where I will explain.

The pain is beyond anything Vera has ever experienced.

Vera has felt pain before, of course. Caned hands as a child, the ache of muscles forced into stillness for too long. The cramps that heralded her first monthly courses. Bruised ribs, bruised face, bruised heart. Small pains, manageable pains. Once she had taken a hockey stick to the shin, while teaching a group of boisterous girls at the third-rate school that she’d ended up in after Cyril. It had made tears sting at her eyes, made her gasp with the pain, and she’d thought for a moment or two that there was a broken bone. Then it had eased, and she had been able to breathe again. The bruise had spread across her whole shin, turned purple and blue, then green and yellow. It had ached for weeks. But it had been manageable.

 _This_ is not manageable. This pain is agony, excruciating, like somebody has grasped hold of her insides and is _squeezing_. This is like being hit on the solar plexus and losing her breath, like cramping so tightly that she cannot stand straight, only a hundred times worse. A thousand times worse. This is the kind of pain, Vera thinks, that can kill a person. Pain that compresses her lungs and narrows her vision and makes her long for oblivion.

There is blood between her legs.

It is slippery between her thighs, thick and congealing as it creeps down her legs. It soaks her knickers and her stockings, ruining her skirt. There is so much of it. Vera has never seen so much blood on her own skin. Not even on Soldier Island. She has killed men and women, of course, but never at close quarters, and never so violently that there is blood like this. She can’t move. She kneels on the landing and blood drips onto the carpet. A vice is gripping her abdomen, and Vera _can’t move_. All she can do is crouch here, hunched over, tears streaming down her face and blood dripping down her legs. It will never come out of the carpet, she thinks. It’s a ridiculous thing to think under the circumstances, but still she stares down at the stain and knows it will never come out.

She can’t cry out for help. There’s no point; she is alone in the house. Philip is out somewhere, perhaps on a job. He’d told her this morning, with a kiss to her forehead, that he would be back late, or perhaps not until morning. _Don’t wait up_ , he’d murmured. It’s hardly unusual; he is still making contacts and spreading feelers through the criminal underworld of New York, city and state both. He is sometimes out late, at clubs or bars or mediocre restaurants. Meeting people, he tells her. Building his reputation, taking small jobs to get to the bigger ones.

Vera doesn’t mind his late nights. Or rather, she does mind, but she doesn’t let herself show it. If she showed him that, if she showed that she dislikes going to bed alone, that she enjoys coming home to find him there…to show any of that would be to reveal far too much of her heart to him. It’s likely he knows anyway, those sharp eyes seeing everything Vera might try to hide. But she never says anything, when he tells her that he’ll be back late or when he slides into bed beside her in the early hours of the morning, and today she had positively welcomed hearing that he would be late. She’d had to tuck away her relief and hope against hope that Philip wouldn’t see the lie. So she had nodded and promised to leave a plate of supper for him, and Philip had either not noticed her mask or been too much in a hurry to stop and push it aside. Vera’s relief at knowing she would be alone all day, all evening, had gone unnoticed. For once he had believed the fiction.

Pain grips her tight. She is panting, gasping, her heartbeat pounding in her ears. She would not have begun this if she had not been sure of his absence, and so she has only herself to blame, if this continues to go so badly wrong. If the blood continues to come, if the pain suffocates her, if Philip does not come home until too late, Vera has only herself to blame. For all her instincts of self-preservation, she may have killed herself as surely as so many other women have killed themselves, over the years, to get rid of the unwanted child in their bellies that cares not whether there is shelter or food or money or love to greet it.

The pain is a knife in her womb, twisting sharply. Vera screams.

 

* * *

 

 _“Hon,” says Peggy, “you gotta start eating better.” She’s eyeing Vera’s lunch with disapproval. They’re eating at her desk, Vera and Peggy and Mattie the nurse. They often crowd around the desk during their brief lunch hour, though Mattie assures Vera that, when the weather’s nicer, they usually sit out at the back door, on the steps of the little yard that holds the rubbish bins and Peggy’s bicycle. It’s private, but gets fresh air and a bit of sun. So Mattie says. Vera has only known New York in the autumn and winter, so far. Spring is close; the temperature is rising, a little. Trees are beginning to sprout new green growth. In another week it will be March. But today it’s raining, and the_ _New York_ _skyline is coated with grey._

_“Seriously,” Peggy continues, “that isn’t enough to keep a cat alive.”_

_Two months ago, Vera might have made some polite reply, composed of nothing, hidden herself behind blandness. But she has slowly grown comfortable with her work colleagues. A little comfortable, at least. She would never reveal her true self to them, but she feels as friendly towards them as she does towards anyone who isn’t Philip. She prefers Peggy to Mattie. Peggy is older, steadier, a single woman who’s Brooklyn-born and Brooklyn-bred. She takes no nonsense from anyone; she’s straight-talking and has never once tried to mother Vera, as she easily might have done if she had been of a different character. Mattie, though. Mattie is a little younger than Vera, and flighty. Flirtatious. Not unpleasant, but not somebody for whom Vera could ever form any kind of attachment._

_“I’ve had to let out three skirts since I moved to_ _Brooklyn_ _,” Vera says, offering a rueful smile to Peggy. It’s not really pretence, though the expression of it is. She has never been demonstrative. Her regretful smile, the little quirk of her lips that expresses distaste, is a performance. She’s borrowed the movements from someone else, but the feeling beneath it is real enough. “I refuse to put on a single ounce more,” she goes on. “I’ll end up having to buy new clothes, at this rate. I couldn’t do up one of my blouses, this morning – not decently, anyway!” It had been vexing in the extreme. A favourite blouse, and the buttons had been so tight that holes had gaped between them, revealing her slip beneath. She had flung the thing into the back of the closet in disgust, and tried another, with hardly any more success. She has been eating smaller portions for a few weeks now, and walking a longer route to the surgery in the morning and evening, but nothing seems to be helping._

 _Mattie laughs. It’s a pleasant enough laugh, and she’s not laughing_ at _Vera, but it sets Vera on edge, just a little. She dislikes being laughed at, even in this kind of light, gossipy conversation. Mattie is harmless, a knowing little flirt who at least has the good sense not to try to flirt with Philip, but this laugh gives Vera the sudden urge to claw her eyes out. It’s a fleeting impulse that she would never allow to become action, but the twinge of exasperation isn’t like her. She sips at her water to cover any trace of a reaction._

 _“It’s our_ _Brooklyn_ _food,” Mattie is proclaiming. “Nothing like it in_ _England_ _, I reckon. And that fella of yours – he cooks, don’t he? Didn’t I hear you say that? Maybe he likes a bit of curve on a woman.” She winks at Vera, who manages a slight smile._

 _“Now, Mattie,” scolds Peggy, “it’s plain for anyone to see that Mr Lombard has eyes for nobody but Vera, no matter what size waist she has.” Mattie laughs again, but she’s nodding her head, as if what Peggy says makes sense. As if it isn’t all part of their disguise, hers and Philip’s. Their camouflage to enable them to go unnoticed. The newly-wed couple, devoted to each other, moved to the_ _United States_ _to start a new life together. There is truth in there somewhere, Vera knows. Philip has expressed, more than once, that he’s not interested in anyone else. She’s able to trust that, mostly. It gets easier, week by week, to believe that he’s truly committed to her. It’s near the end of February now; they met last August. And still he seems fascinated, still he seems to find her worthwhile. The longer it goes on, the more Vera is able to trust._

 _She still doesn’t know_ why _he’s so determined, why he’s spent these past months nudging or pushing her into putting down roots with him, but she is beginning to trust that he means what he says. He’s had excuses to leave, after all, and yet he’s still here._

_“I’ve heard no complaints,” she says. She’s relaxed enough around these two women that she can give them this bit of warmth, this bit of feminine conversation. It’s a part to play, like any other, but one that costs her little and is easy enough to perform. She allows herself to think, just for a moment, of the way Philip glances at her, still so admiring after all these months. The way he clasps her hips in his hands, or cups her breasts, and leaves her in no doubt as to his desire for her. Mattie’s laughing again, and Vera looks up, demurely, and lets her expression speak. Peggy laughs too, and shakes her head, scolding them both for talking like that in a workplace._

_“But really, hon, you need to look after yourself,” Peggy says to her then. “You ought to know a bit of weight gain’s just to be expected. Those skirts just aren’t gonna fit you all that much longer. You’re eating for two now, honey, and those bitty sandwiches won’t keep you going.”_

_Vera almost chokes on her sandwich, reaches for her glass of water to wash it down. “I_ beg _your pardon,” she manages. “What on earth –,” Peggy passes her a paper napkin, and Vera wipes her mouth and curses herself for the loss of composure. She’s revealing too much, too incredulous to conceal her feelings, but Peggy’s implication has stunned her. “Eating for two?” she repeats. “You can’t mean – surely you don’t mean –,”_

_Peggy’s eyebrows are raised. “Didn’t you know, Vera?” she asks, a little gentler now, the scolding note fading from her voice. “Well – I mean, I might be wrong, honey, but…”_

_“No, no, I see it now,” says Mattie. All the flirtation and laughter has gone from her voice; she is now a nurse, a professional, as she regards Vera closely. Vera shouldn’t be surprised. She’s seen Mattie working before, seen her calm, careful demeanour with patients. And yet Vera_ is _surprised, she is_ reeling _from these insinuations. She can’t think. She can’t speak. She looks down at herself and every instinct cries out that they are mistaken. They’re wrong. There’s no way. It’s not_ possible _. “Maybe three, four months,” Mattie continues. “But you must have known, Vera? Haven’t your courses stopped?”_

_Vera shakes her head. “I have – I’ve never been regular,” she says stiffly. Not since she first began bleeding, a scared little thing of thirteen, convinced that this horrifying thing, this blood coming from inside her, was a punishment for her wicked and twisted nature. One of the matrons had explained it to her, and given her a coarse pad to wear in her knickers when she bled. Monthlies, they’d called it, but Vera hadn’t understood the name until she’d seen her peers go through it. A monthly cycle of bleeding, and cramps, and Vera had watched the other girls and been relieved that she bled so infrequently. “Perhaps three times a year,” she adds. Some part of her is appalled at sharing such things with two women that, really, she scarcely knows. They’re work colleagues, not friends. They’re not people she trusts. And yet she’s giving them honesty, too stunned to lie._

_There’s nothing wrong with her physically, or so she has been told. She’s simply irregular. Infertile, most likely. It’s why she’s never worried, with Philip. She’s never bothered about contraception. They talked about it once, on the ship coming from_ _England_ _. He’d suggested they should be careful and she’d explained, concisely, that there’s no reason to be concerned. She bled once, in October. Not again. But she hasn’t worried; there’s been no reason to worry._

_“It’s not possible,” she says. “It simply isn’t possible.”_

_“Come on into my room,” Mattie suggests, still reasonable, still professional. “Let’s give you the once over and see, shall we?”_

_Mattie is compassionate but clinical as she examines Vera. She listens to Vera’s heartbeat and asks various questions, and Vera fixes her gaze on the clock on the wall as she answers. No sickness, she says. No particular sensitivity. Some fatigue, she has to acknowledge. Mattie nods and asks about mood swings. Vera thinks about her life with Philip, these past few months, and doesn’t know how to answer. She presses her lips together and shrugs her shoulders._

_At the end of it, Mattie is unequivocal. “You’re about three months along, Vera,” she says. “You really didn’t think you could?”_

_Vera shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says. “I was told…I saw doctors, in_ _England_ _. They couldn’t decide what was wrong, but with my monthlies so rare…” She trails off. It’s only shock that makes her speak so much. Her mind, usually whirring with lies, spinning stories into truths, is utterly blank. Utterly silent. Three months along. The words echo around and around in her head. Pregnant. It’s impossible. It’s an impossible thing, and Vera is wholly unequipped to process the news._

 _“You don’t seem very pleased, Vera,” says Mattie. It’s like she’s speaking from the other end of a long tunnel; barely audible, blurred and far-off. Vera closes her eyes and reaches, desperately, for a lie. She needs a lie, she needs a mask, she needs to find_ something _to conceal herself with.  
_

_“I’m just…stunned,” she says, wrapping truth in a falsehood to make it palatable for her audience. She opens her eyes and offers Mattie a weak, tremulous smile. “I never expected – I never dreamed this could happen. Philip and I never thought we would have children.”_

_Philip. Oh God, she thinks, Philip._

_Mattie is talking about recommending a midwife, and getting more checks because of her irregular monthlies, and how Philip will be so glad. Ice prickles down Vera’s spine. She clenches her hands into fists._

_“Would you mind,” she interrupts Mattie, “would you mind – keeping this to yourself for a while? You and Peggy.”_

_“Well…sure, if you like,” Mattie agrees, frowning a little as she looks at Vera. “But you need to get a better check-up, Vera. Like I said, I know a good midwife, and she’ll be happy to take you on, I’m sure.” Vera says nothing. Mattie washes her hands in the sink in the corner and dries them slowly, so slowly that it makes Vera want to scream. Panic and fear are grasping at her, choking her throat, and she wants Mattie gone, she wants her_ gone _so that Vera can try to work out what to do. “I’ll leave you alone for a bit,” Mattie says at last. “The doctors won’t be back for another ten minutes. You just…sit there for a couple of minutes, okay? I’ll get Peggy to make you some of that tea you like so much.”_

_The door closes behind her. Vera shuts her eyes and lets her hand rest, lightly, on her abdomen. Pregnant. A child growing inside her, a child created from her own monstrous nature. But Philip’s child, too. Something to prove that she and Philip are real, that though their marriage is a lie presented to the world, there is something real there too. Some kind of affection. Love, on her part, twisted though it might be, unnatural and possessive and unholy. She loves him. She needs him. She won’t let him go without a fight, won’t let anything come between them._

_When Philip had raised the question of contraception, Vera remembers, it had been with a clear disinclination for children. She doesn’t know how he will react to this. It’s done; there is no preventing it. He will either stay, or he will abandon her. Either way, Vera will lose him. If he stays, she will lose his focus, lose the faint chance that perhaps he might love her if only he finds nothing else more worthwhile to love. The chance, the_ chance _that this is a happiness that might last for the rest of her life. A child would interfere. A child would take all of his love and attention and leave nothing for her. Or, even if it didn’t take all, it would show him so clearly that she is_ wrong _. Incapable of loving another the way he would expect. Incapable, no doubt, of loving a child. Too unnatural to love or be loved.  
_

_And if he doesn’t stay, if he leaves her because of this, she will lose everything. She has known for weeks that she would be destroyed if she lost him. If he leaves because of an unwanted child, Vera will be destroyed.  
_

_She opens her eyes and takes a deep breath. Nothing can come between them. Nothing. She won’t let it. She will do whatever it takes to keep Philip with her._  


* * *

  _  
_

Pain drags Vera out of unconsciousness. She is slumped over on the landing, head pressed against the skirting board of the wall, back bent awkwardly. She’s folded almost double, her lower half still mostly kneeling. The blood between her legs is sticky when she feels it. The stickiness of congealing blood, not the slick of fresh flow. Perhaps the bleeding has stopped. But the pain hasn’t stopped. It is still a hand gripping her tight, something wrenching at her womb, pulling or squeezing or twisting. It’s a constant flood of agony; there’s no relief from it. No breathing space.

She tries to right herself, but moving makes it hurt worse. The bleeding might have stopped, but the pain is no less. It makes her feel sick, makes her stomach roil and revolt. She tastes bile in her mouth, burning in her throat. She spits it out, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. She never does seem to have a handkerchief when she needs one. She had thrown up on Soldier Island, she remembers. The stink of those dead bodies had been so revolting, and she’d thrown up. No handkerchief then, either. Her sleeve had sufficed. Philip had held her hand throughout. And afterwards, after he’d killed Wargrave, he’d wrapped his arms around her and held her until she stopped shaking.

She wants him now. She wants Philip here. She wants his strong arms around her, wants him murmuring soothing words into her ear. He can be so cold, so cruelly determined to drag out every last ounce of truth from her, but he can be gentle, too. She wants his gentleness now. She has to squeeze her eyes shut against unwanted tears and presses her lips tightly together to keep from calling out for him. There’s no point. He isn’t here. He is out somewhere in this vast city, and her pain cannot bring him back any sooner.

She has to find a lie. The awareness of that drifts through her mind, between sharp twists and jabs of pain. She needs to find a story to tell. If she survives this, if she has not lost too much blood, if Philip comes back and finds her…oh God, she thinks, if Philip finds her like this, there’s no telling how he’ll react. She needs a lie, but it’s hard to think, hard to concentrate. The pain is relentless, and every slight movement makes it worse. Sharp stabs of it in her abdomen, in her womb. The blood, she thinks. There must be an excuse for the blood. Something she can try to make him believe. But there can be no concealing where the blood has come from, no pretending that it is anything else. Abortion or miscarriage, the blood flows from her womb and vaginal passage, and there is no lie that can cover that up.

Abortion or miscarriage.

Vera lifts her head, tries to straighten a little, but the pain makes her retch again. There’s nothing more in her stomach, nothing more to throw up. She vomits until her stomach hurts, muscles cramping around emptiness. Her throat is raw. It all adds to the pain, the _agony_ of whatever is happening inside her body. She knows what she intended to happen, knows what she paid for when she’d gone to that back-alley woman who’d charged a fortune for a small bottle and told her to drink it in a bath laced with Epsom salts and so hot she could barely stand it. Vera knows her poisons. She’d known it could easily work. And it must have worked; no foetus could have survived this. But the blood loss is extreme, the pain is _extreme_ , and Vera may have killed herself as surely as she killed the baby.

That’s what she must hide. Philip must never know it was an abortion. She sees that clearly, though everything else feels hazy and out of reach. He must never know. There can be no hiding from him that she’s lost a child, but it must be an accident. An accidental miscarriage will ensure that Philip won’t reject her. If he says he’d have wanted the child, then it will not be Vera’s fault that it is lost. And if he declares he has no wish for a child anyway, then Vera will still be guiltless. No harm will be done if she can make him believe it has all been a terrible accident.

She’s never been able to lie to him before. She has kept her pregnancy from him for a fortnight. Two long, terrifying weeks. But that has been an omission, a truth buried deep and no lie told to cover it. She hasn’t _needed_ to lie; he’s been so busy. All she’s had to do was carefully conceal any sign of her pregnancy and any hint that she’s been disturbed by anything. She must do more than that, now. She must make him believe an untruth.

Vera is at the top of the stairs still. They’re narrow stairs, a little on the steep side. She looks down at the dark entry below, and she knows what she has to do. It’s going to hurt like hell, hurt more even than the agony already twisting inside her. But there’s no choice. A fall could bring on a miscarriage, after all. Falling down the stairs can cause damage enough. Her first kill had been from a fall down the stairs. The memory normally brings Vera a slight, twisted twinge of pleasure. Her first kill, and though entirely unintentional, it had been the first time she had carefully, quietly got rid of someone. Not someone who was in her way or who had something she wanted, the way most of the rest had been. Somebody who had hurt her. Somebody who had _deserved_ it.

It usually brings her pleasure, but not now. Matron Lucas had broken her neck, slipping on a bar of soap and flying head over heels down a dark staircase. Vera must be careful in her own fall. She must cause bruises and scrapes and perhaps a sprained ankle or wrist, but no more. She doesn’t have a death wish, though she may well have caused her own death by trying to get rid of something that was in her way. She must be _so careful_ now.

It takes so much effort for her to get up. It hurts so much. She tries to lift herself onto her knees first, and it should be easy, for she’s been folded double, but pain wrenches at her as she tries to straighten. She scrabbles at the wall, trying to find a handhold to help, but there’s nothing. She manages at last. She kneels up on the landing and feels warm blood trickling down her thighs again. Fresh blood. Movement is agony, but she has to do it, so she grits her teeth, tries to breathe, and reaches up to grasp the end of the banister. Her hand is sticky with congealed blood, but she takes hold and heaves herself upright.

There are a few moments of unimaginable, unbearable pain. A few moments while Vera stands at the stop of the staircase, gasping for breath, feeling like something has knocked all the air from her lungs. She is light-headed. She sways.

And then she falls.

 

* * *

  

_Vera is agitated for the rest of the afternoon. She shows a calm face, and is as diligent as ever in her work, but inside she is frantic. Inside she is torn between panic and resolution. Her stomach is churning with anxiety. She does not doubt the course she must take, but there are hurdles to be overcome, and none of them easy._

_As minute after minute ticks by, she both longs for and dreads the coming of_ _six o’clock_ _, and the end of the working day. She becomes increasingly desperate to escape Peggy’s encouraging smiles and Mattie’s concerned glances. They mean well, and if Vera were another woman, perhaps she would accept their concern and their care. But she is who she is, and she has to stifle the urge to snap at them. Instead she finds the right lie to tell, the right mask to wear. She pretends she is quietly surprised, bemused but preparing to be happy. A woman who never expected a child, suddenly faced with the impossible._

_They believe her. Everybody always believes Vera’s lies, except for Philip._

_That’s why she dreads the end of the day, why she dreads going home. She will have to lie to him, just as she’s lying to Peggy and Mattie now, but the difference is that Philip has never believed her before. Not like these women, not like their neighbours, not like everyone else they meet or know. And she has become so used to giving him the truth, so keen to please him and so relaxed in their home together, that she has no defences against him now. She’s sure he’ll see through anything she tries to use as a mask, and he’ll drag the truth from her before long, in one way or another. He always has, so far. But Vera can’t let that happen this time. She must find a lie and tell it better than she has ever told any other, because she can’t risk losing him._

_At the end of the day, when the last patient has left and Vera has finished the last of her filing, Mattie comes to her with a piece of paper._

_“The midwife I was talking about,” she explains. “She’s over near the bridge, and she’s the best. You make sure you go see her soon.”_

_“I will,” Vera lies. “Thank you.” She pockets the paper and shrugs on her coat. She won’t see a midwife, or if she does, it certainly won’t be one that Mattie recommends. Midwives bring life into the world; Vera has in mind another kind of woman entirely. The kind of woman who doesn’t do her best to deliver healthy babies to healthy mothers. The kind who works out of their own home and claims to be a herbalist. The kind who asks no inconvenient questions and is happy to take an envelope of cash in return for a bottle of some poisonous stuff. Or for something worse. Vera is hardly innocent, and she has heard stories of practices that are horrific enough to make even_ her _shudder. She hopes it won’t come to that. She hopes it’s early enough that it will be easy work to destroy the child inside her._

 _But still, it will take time to find someone. Vera is still a stranger in New York, in many ways. In_ _Manchester_ _or_ _London_ _she would know how to follow the discreet signs to a back street abortionist. She would know where to go to find an answer to her question, at least._ _New York_ _is a strange city. That there will be such women isn’t in question._ _New York_ _is a city like any other, and there are desperate women everywhere. But Vera doesn’t know where to begin looking. Her own little corner of_ _Brooklyn_ _is becoming more familiar to her, it’s true, but not_ that _much. None of her acquaintances are likely to have such information. Not Peggy and Mattie at the surgery. Not her next door neighbour, Mrs Bell. There are, perhaps, a few women further down the street who might be able to help Vera, but that’s too close. Far too close to home. Women tend to keep secrets for each other, Vera has observed over her few adult years, but it would be too easy for them to let something slip. The wrong word said to the wrong listener, and Philip might hear about it, find out about it. Nothing must being this to Philip’s attention. Nothing._

 _So she must find someone by other methods, and she has to do it quietly and quickly. The longer it takes, the harder it will be to conceal from Philip. Not merely because of the physical changes that will take place, but because he is so terribly adept at seeing through all her masks. Even the ones that aren’t quite a lie. He’s seen through her, seen_ into _her, right from the very beginning. He’s demanded the truth and pulled it out from behind her teeth even when she snapped and snarled at him._

_She has been trying not to lie to him. These past few weeks, these two months since Christmas, Vera has tried so hard. But this isn’t a lie, she tells herself. It’s an omission. Perhaps he won’t see an omission. He’s so busy at the moment, perhaps this will escape his notice, if she is careful to behave normally._

_She doesn’t go straight home, when she leaves the surgery. There’s no reason to hurry. Philip isn’t going to be there, not until later. It’s still raining, but she has an umbrella, and this isn’t something she can think about at home. She has to find a lie first, find a way to disguise the truth, let it sink deep into her skin and her bones so there’s nothing to see when Philip gets home tonight. She can’t craft a mask in the house, though. She’s grown too used to being honest, there. Damn him for that. Damn him for making her feel safe, for making her relax. Damn him for making her trust that she can be utterly and openly herself, with him. He’s told her he’ll keep her safe, he’s said over and over again that he’s not going anywhere, and Vera has tried so hard to trust him. She’s tried so hard. She’s relaxed her guard more and more, inch by inch, the walls of their home creating a sanctuary in which she can be herself and yet not be rejected._

_If she goes there now, before finding a lie or a half-truth or a mask to hide behind, she will never manage to deceive him. She has trusted him too much for that. She needs the lie first, she needs to bury herself in it before she goes home. And even then, she knows it may not work. Even then, Philip will likely sniff it out, like a hound after a fox. He’ll sniff it out and claw into her until he’s ripped the truth out of her, and then he’ll be merciless._

_She wanders around aimlessly for a while, keeping herself tucked under her umbrella and trying to avoid puddles. Eventually the rain drives her inside, and she goes to a café and buys a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie, which she eats mechanically and doesn’t taste. She sits in a seat by the window, her feet wet and her legs cold, and watches people outside but doesn’t really see them. Usually she likes to people-watch, likes to see what tics or tells they have that she can incorporate into her own masks. But this evening all her attention is on her own situation. She can’t think about anything else._

_She’s over an hour late by the time she turns her steps towards home, and still all she has been able to come up with is to bury this secret deep, deep inside and to hope that Philip is distracted enough with his work that he won’t see anything amiss. If he scents a secret, nothing will stop him from seeking it out, but if he doesn’t see anything..._

_For now, Vera decides, she will just have to hope that she can manage with lies of omission, rather than with outright falsehoods. But she must find an abortionist, and soon. She’s already bursting out of her clothes; much more and Philip will realise the truth. It won’t matter how busy he is, it won’t matter that he’s still spreading feelers among_ _New York_ _’s underbelly, still bolstering his reputation here. He’ll be able to see the truth in Vera’s body, and then everything will be over._

* * *

  

There’s a knocking sound, somewhere.

It’s distant, like Vera’s hearing it through water. Like she’s in a swimming pool, beneath the surface, and somewhere above a door has been slammed. Like the strange thump of her heartbeat in her ears when she submerges herself in the bath. Knock, knock. Knock, knock. She can’t make sense of it.

Slowly she becomes aware of other things, but these sensations are as dim as the knocking sound. A throbbing pain in her wrist. Another at her ankle, more jangling, like she’s hit against a bone and set nerves ablaze. Something wet on her face, trickling down the side of her forehead. And cold; she feels _cold_. She feels the cold sinking into her bones, feels her body shake with intermittent tremors from it. Her face is cold, and her hands, and her feet must be numb from it, for she can barely feel them. Every shiver makes something hurt: her wrist, her ankle, and something deeper too. Something inside her, something…there’s something wrong, she thinks. There’s something wrong with her. Only the knowledge is beyond her grasp. Like the knocking, it’s floating around in her mind somewhere but she can’t make it real.

Knock, knock. Knock, knock. She can’t stop the sound of it. It drums into her head. She tries to open her eyes, finds herself in darkness and can’t place where she is. She was at home, she remembers being at home, but nothing else. She was doing something important, she thinks, but what? What was she doing?

Knock, knock.

“Mrs Lombard?”

Vera tries to lift her head, and something trickles into her eye. She lifts a hand to wipe it away but her wrist hurts when she moves, a sharp burst of strained muscle when she tries to rotate it. A sprain, her mind catalogues. She’s sprained her wrist somehow. She’d fallen, she recalls suddenly. She’d fallen…

“Mrs Lombard? Vera?”

She tries to sit upright, but agony jabs at her womb and suddenly Vera remembers everything. She remembers what she’d done, and blood between her legs. She remembers deciding to fall down the stairs, and though the fall itself is hazier, she can recognise, now, that she’s at the bottom of the stairs. In the darkness she begins to distinguish different shapes; the doorframes of the kitchen and sitting room, on either side of her. The sloping ceiling of the stairs. If she turns her head just a little, she can see the coat hooks beside the front door. Her coat sits there neatly, where she’d left it when she’d got in from work. It feels like a lifetime ago.

She can’t tell if she’s still bleeding. She can’t tell if she’s broken a bone. Her wrist feels like a sprain, but her feet…she can’t feel her feet, and she doesn’t know if it’s cold and shock or if she’s done some more serious damage to herself. She tries to move again, to sit up, but it’s too much. She can’t even cry out from the pain, it’s too much for that. It takes her breath away. She makes the barest of sounds, the slightest of moans, barely audible even to herself.

The knocking becomes more insistent, and this time Vera connects it to something. She connects it to the front door. Somebody is knocking on the door. Not Philip; of course not Philip. He has a key, and would never hesitate to use it, especially if he had some reason to suspect trouble. And even without a key, Vera thinks, he wouldn’t knock. She remembers him breaking down a door on Soldier Island. He’s strong. He’d break the door down now, if he wanted to come in. Locks don’t stop him.

But there’s someone there, someone calling out Vera’s name in a tone that’s increasingly concerned. It takes a moment more for Vera to place the voice, dazed as she is, her mind slowed and dulled by pain and shock and cold. It’s the neighbour, Mrs Bell. Bridget Bell. Irish, like Philip, though from a different part of the island.

“Mrs Lombard, I heard you crying out,” Mrs Bell is calling through the door. “Do you need help? Is there a spare key?” Then something more muffled, and another voice, deeper and more distant. Her husband, maybe. There’s a rattle of the handle, and then the letterbox is pushed open. “I can’t see anything, Jack,” Bridget says to whoever is with her. “But it _wasn’t_ the children and I _didn’t_ imagine it.”

“We sure there’s no spare key?” her husband asks. Vera tries to speak, but her mouth is too dry. It hurts to take a deep breath.

“They never told me, if there is,” Bridget frets. “I think you’d better break it down.” She’s rattling the letterbox again, as if she’s peering through it trying to see something in the darkness. There _is_ a spare key, but neither Philip nor Vera has trusted any of their neighbours with that information. The key is in the back garden, well hidden behind a loose brick in the steps that lead up to the back door. Only Vera and Philip know about it. It won’t do the Bells any good now, not unless she can summon the energy, the breath, to call out to them.

There’s something trickling into Vera’s eye again. She has a terrible suspicion that it’s blood. She might have hit her head against something, the banister or a corner of the stairs or even the floor. It would explain how foggy everything feels. Concussion, perhaps. She’s never had a concussion before; she doesn’t know what it feels like. She closes her eyes against the blood and tries to moisten her lips. She wants to call out for help, she who has never liked asking for help, but she can’t manage more than the faintest breath of a whisper, the name of someone who isn’t here. The sound doesn’t even reach her own ears. Oh, she wants Philip. She wants Philip to be here. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore, all her twisted fears about what might or might not happen if he found out about the baby. None of it matters. She’s cold and in pain and so afraid, and she wants Philip to hold her and kiss her forehead and promise to look after her.  

The second voice outside is clearer now. “Now look, Bridget, I don’t want to be breaking down this door if you’re not sure,” says Jack Bell. “There’s not a peep now.”

Vera wonders what time it is. She wonders when Philip will come home. She wonders if Jack Bell will break the door down, or if he’ll decide Bridget has imagined things and take her back home. Her head is aching, and there’s a tightness across her chest when she tries to take a deep breath. Her lips are still dry, her mouth like sandpaper, and she’s still shivering every now and then but less often. She feels numb, the pain receding in the face of it. Numbness creeps across her, eases the trembling, and if she doesn’t move, she doesn’t hurt quite so much. She feels so very cold. It would be so very easy to drift off into this numbness, this dark fog that’s clouding everything in her mind. It would be so easy to float away…

No, she thinks. No. She is many things, but she is not somebody who gives up easily. She will not let this defeat her. The Bells are still there, arguing outside the front door, but it sounds like Jack is winning, Bridget’s voice quieter now, no more knocking on the door or pushing at the letterbox. All Vera has to do is make a sound, loud enough for them to hear. That’s all she has to do. If she can’t do it with her voice, she must find another way. And oh, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to hurt _so much_ , but Vera will not let this be her end. Not this way.

She’s right; it does hurt. Pain wrenches at her womb again, makes her ribs hurt and her head throb harder. Pain or concussion makes her feel dizzy and nauseated, but she fights through it, gasping for breath as she lifts her good hand and brings it thumping down onto the floor. There’s no sign that she’s been heard, and Vera could cry but she doesn’t have the strength so all she does is grit her teeth and bang her fist against the floorboards again. Please, she thinks. Please.

“Did you hear that, Jack?” Bridget asks, voice clearer again, as if she’s stepped closer to the door. “Mrs Lombard? Vera?”

“I heard something,” Jack agrees. Vera lets her arm fall limp again; she doesn’t think she could knock a third time, even if it hasn’t been enough to persuade Jack Bell that he should break down the door. “Alright, Bridget,” he decides. “I’ll need something to use. Just hold on, I’ll be back.” There’s the sound of footsteps down the front steps, and then Bridget opens the letterbox again and calls through.

“We’re coming, Vera,” she says. “Just hold on for me. Jack’ll get the door down, no problem. You just hang on there.”

She can do that; she can hang on. Perhaps she’ll hate herself later, for ending up in a position where she needs help from anyone, but for now she just feels relieved that there’s someone there, even if it’s just the Bells and not Philip. She wonders again what time it is. It’s so dark outside, barely a glimmer of light coming through the letterbox when Bridget pushes it open. She can’t remember if Philip had said what time he might be home, or if he’d just said ‘late’. Perhaps ‘late’ will become ‘too late’. She must have lost so much blood. There had been so much blood up on the landing. And oh, she’s cold. She’s so very cold.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ!

She thinks she’s dreaming. She’s dreaming that the front door has been slammed open, that there are warm hands touching her face. Dreaming or hallucinating. She can smell something, too, something more than the metallic tang of blood. Philip’s cologne fills her nostrils, and it’s comforting, even if it is a dream.

“Vera! _Vera!_ ”

She dreams that he’s kneeling beside her on the floor, hands roving over her body, calling out to her in a tone of voice she’s never heard from him before. But then he touches her leg, near to her hip, and he tries to roll her a little and sharp, hot agony makes Vera choke on a scream. She wouldn’t dream this; she wouldn’t hallucinate Philip hurting her, even by accident. Oh, she thinks, as he curses again and then calls out for someone to call an ambulance. Oh, he’s here. He’s _here_ , he’s _real_ , she really can smell his cologne and feel his hands pushing her hair out of her face.

“Vera, open your eyes, darling,” he entreats her. “C’mon, darling, just open your eyes. Stay with me.” He sounds so frantic that she summons the energy to obey him. He needs a shave, jaw covered in dark stubble, and it must be raining, for his hair is beginning to curl despite the pomade he uses. She loves the way his hair curls; she loves how he complains about it, the refrain so familiar to her now after all these months together. She tries to smile, tries to lift her hand to touch him, but it’s too much for her, and anyway Philip shushes her. He cups her face in his hands and presses a kiss to her forehead. “Just lie still,” he says. “Lie still. Help’s coming, darling. You stay with me, you hear?”

“Here, put this over her,” offers someone else – Bridget, Vera identifies, Bridget Bell has crowded into the hallway too. There’s bright light now; somebody has switched on the electric light. Everything looks strange from Vera’s position on the floor. She can’t quite orient herself, and everything seems out of proportion. Philip takes the blanket Bridget holds out, and he drapes it over Vera, but it doesn’t make any difference. She’s cold and numb and she can’t keep her eyes open.

“No, no, stay awake,” Philip insists. “Vera, are you listening to me? Keep your eyes open. Look at me, darling. _Christ_ , there’s blood everywhere!”

There’s something very important that she has to tell him. She knows that, she knows there’s _something_ she has to say, something that she had thought while lying here on the floor in the darkness, alone. He kisses her forehead again, and mutters under his breath. Vera tries to reach for him again, but it hurts to move, and anyway he’s tucking the blanket close around her so she can’t lift her arm. She can’t remember what it is she has to tell him; everything is fading, drowned beneath the pain and the cold and the blood.

She closes her eyes and drifts away.

 

* * *

 

_When Vera at last reaches home, there’s someone sitting on the top step, leaning against the front door. She stifles her irritation and doesn’t allow a scowl to form. The last thing she wants to do right now is interact with another human being. But there’s no avoiding it, so she peers through the dark and the rain to try to see who it is that’s parked on her doorstep in a dripping wet, bedraggled heap._

_“Why, Mr_ _Wilson_ _!” she exclaims, when she recognises him. “What on earth are you doing here?” He looks soaked to the skin. His hair is plastered to his skull and he’s clenching his jaw as if to keep his teeth from chattering. She’s genuinely surprised to see him, and there’s no obvious need to hide that, so she doesn’t bother. She waits while he stands up and shuffles to one side, then she unlocks the front door and ushers him inside. “You’re wet through,” she scolds him. “What on earth were you thinking, sitting there in the rain? It will serve you right if you catch cold.”_

_“Ma’am,” Wilson mumbles. He stands just inside the front door and watches as Vera puts her umbrella down and begins to unbutton her coat. “Lombard sent me,” he says. Water drips down his nose. Vera rolls her eyes skyward and motions him into the kitchen ahead of her. “He sent me to tell you he’s got to be away a couple of days. Said as how I wasn’t to leave here without telling you.”_

_“I doubt he meant for you to sit in the rain for – how long have you been there?” She doesn’t bother waiting for an answer. She puts the kettle on and finds a clean cup. If Philip sent him, that means this was an unexpected engagement, and a sudden one. If he’d known earlier, he would have called the surgery, despite the prohibition against taking personal calls on the office telephone. He’s good like that; he always makes sure she knows when he’s got to be away. Perhaps he knows that she still harbours a dark terror of him leaving her; perhaps it’s his way of reassuring her. Once upon a time she would have bridled at the idea that someone could see into her heart and discover all her fears, but Vera has changed. Philip has changed her. All she feels now is a warm swell of fondness for his thoughtfulness…and a pang of relief that she will not have to lie to him tonight. She will have precious hours, even a day or two, to compose herself and bury the truth deep. Time to find what she needs, maybe._

_The seed of an idea begins to form in her mind. Wilson is, to say the least, an unsavoury character. He’s not so dangerous as Philip, not so clever, but he is nonetheless a criminal. And he’s a New Yorker, too. He will have connections. He must know people._

_She fetches a second cup._

_“I’ll make you a coffee,” she says over her shoulder to_ _Wilson_ _. “It will warm you up a bit, at least, before you go back out into the rain.”_

_“Aw, no, ma’am,” he protests. “You don’t need to go to no trouble. I just came to deliver the message, see? I’ll be getting along now.”_

_“You will not,” Vera contradicts him flatly. “You’ll drink your coffee and warm up. It’s no trouble at all. Think of it as a thank you for bringing the message.” She turns back to him, offers a sweet smile. “I do appreciate it, Mr Wilson. I should have been up all night worrying, if Philip hadn’t thought to send you.”_ _Wilson_ _nods jerkily. He’s beginning to shiver now, the warmth of the house a marked contrast to the cold, wet evening outside. He’s getting water on the floor, but Vera sets aside her irritation. It serves no purpose. She needs to draw him in, to sneak underneath his defences, not to alienate him._

_So she makes him a cup of coffee and then, idly remarking that she’s hungry and no doubt he is too, she grills some toast for them both. Wilson is wary at first, and she’s sure he’s remembering the last time he was in this kitchen, but she asks about his family, about his day, about the girl he’s seeing, and soon he’s thawed and is talking easily enough. It takes time. She’s cautious. The clock has struck eight by the time she sees her moment and strikes. He’s finished his toast, and a second cup of coffee, and then, with a guilty look, he says that he should go._

_“I should’ve been gone already,” he admits. “They’re not waitin’ on me or nothing, but if I’m too late I won’t get my cut.” He rises and turns his cap around and around in his hands. “You, uh – you won’t tell Lombard I took up so much of your time, ma’am, will you?” he asks, glancing sidelong at her, offering a lopsided smile that makes him look much younger and less like the tough little ruffian she’s sure he tries to present to the world. “He, uh…he told me pretty clear not to be a bother.”_

_“It’ll be our secret,” Vera agrees. Wilson’s smile widens, and he lifts his cap to his head. “But perhaps in return for keeping your secret,” she goes on, “you’ll do me a favour.” He freezes, and the smile disappears. She can see the thoughts flitting through his mind. The suspicion about what she’d done to her former landlady. The way Philip has spoken about her. There’s caution and alertness and, if not quite intelligence, then at least a kind of base cunning. She knows that he doesn’t suppose she means something so innocent as popping down to the shop to buy her a packet of cigarettes. She smiles at him, perfectly pleasantly. “I’m looking for someone, you see,” she says. “I’m afraid I don’t know_ _New York_ _well enough yet.”_ _Wilson_ _hunches his shoulders and lowers his hand without putting his cap on. “And,” she adds, “it’s very important to me that Philip doesn’t know about it.” She lets her smile turn sharp; he swallows audibly._

_“I don’t know as I can help, ma’am,” he mumbles._

_“Of course. You’re afraid of Philip. I quite understand.” She puts down her empty coffee cup and nods at his. “Enjoy your coffee, did you?”_

_Wilson_ _inhales, stares hard at the empty cup, and then looks up at her with wide eyes and gaping mouth. “You – you never –,” he stammers. She shrugs one shoulder, lifts an eyebrow slightly. She hadn’t, of course. There are poisons that will act quickly, and he hadn’t been watching as she made the coffee, but poisoning him wouldn’t suit her purpose. There’s no harm in letting him think otherwise, however._ _Wilson_ _swears under his breath. “You never did,” he says. “You wouldn’t.” But he’s not sure. He’s scared. He’s exactly where she wants him._

_“Find me what I need,” Vera tells him, “and not a word to anyone, and you can have the antidote. Understood?”_

_Wilson_ _stares at her for a moment longer, and then he sags and nods. “Yes, ma’am,” he says resignedly. “I get it._

* * *

 

Next chapter will be posted tomorrow. 


	2. Chapter 2

Consciousness returns only in fits and starts. Moments of wakefulness snag in her mind, like fleeting newsreel images, not quite devoid of sound or sensation but somehow set at a distance. And between these moments, there is darkness and there are dreams.

She is aware of being moved, of the pain that movement causes. She’s lifted up into the air even though she tries to moan a protest, but somebody is holding her hand, telling her…the words are too distant for her to hear. Then later, hours or minutes or days, a bright light is shone into her eyes, and she flinches away from it. An antiseptic smell drifts into her dreams, and she dreams of drowning. She dreams of a wave rising up above her, an undertow dragging her down, down into the darkest depths. Relentless, it drags her down even though she fights against it. There are hands on her wrists, trying to hold her down, and Vera fights and struggles and hears Philip shouting. She doesn’t know if he’s shouting at her or at someone else, but he’s shouting so loud, his accent thick, his voice so near that she could almost reach out and touch it. Something is pressing on her chest, her stomach. There’s a weight there, a heavy weight, and she’s been chained to it. She can’t move her arms or legs, but there’s a dead weight attached to her and it’s going to make her sink. She tries to speak, to say to someone that she doesn’t want to drown. She wants to _live_ , she wants to wriggle out of these chains and swim up to the surface and breathe fresh air. But she can’t speak, and she can’t move. She can’t save herself and nobody is coming to save her.

In the darkness, somebody is still holding her hand. She can feel it, warm against hers, long fingers wrapping around her own, a digit rubbing circles on the back of her hand. She can’t move, so she can’t respond. Perhaps, she thinks hazily, she can be saved from drowning, if only the owner of this hand doesn’t let go. Don’t let go, she begs silently. Philip, don’t let go.

When true consciousness returns, and lucidity with it, there is still a hand holding hers. Or more precisely, covering it; her hand is resting on the bed she’s lying on, and Philip’s hand is covering hers, his thumb curled under and tucked against her palm. But he isn’t moving. The sounds in the room gradually filter through to her: a clock ticking; a murmuring of voices somewhere outside; and close beside her, the gentle, regular breathing that lets her know Philip is asleep.

Her body feels heavy, sluggish, so for a while she just lies there, eyes shut, listening to his breathing. It reassures her, the steadiness of it. She is alive. Her limbs feel leaden, her head aches, and whenever she breathes too deeply there is a dull jabbing pain in her lower ribcage, but she is _alive_.

Eventually she opens her eyes. She’s in a hospital room. A side room, she guesses, because she’s by herself, no other beds or patients here. Just her, in crisp hospital sheets, and Philip in a chair beside her. He’s bent almost double against the bed, arm acting as a pillow for his head, his expression so totally relaxed as he slumbers. His hair has broken free of his pomade, and the sight of it makes her smile. She loves his curls. She loves them all the more, perhaps, because he dislikes them so. They’re incongruous to the image he presents to the world, and she likes being one of the few to see them. She likes waking up in the morning and seeing his hair wild as he sleeps beside her.

Slowly, because she’s still sluggish in a way that makes her think she must be dosed with something, Vera slides her hand out from underneath his. She reaches for his head, just barely within reach, and slides her fingers through his hair. Philip twitches slightly, then settles again. She wants to smile, but all her energy is going into holding her hand up and gently, tenderly stroking his hair. It’s not soft, there’s too much pomade still in it for that, but it’s soothing to keep making this motion, this rhythmic movement. At the corners of her mind lurks the knowledge of what she’s done, and she knows that sooner or later she’ll have to face up to it, but for now this is soothing.

Philip stirs again, shaking off her hand as he lifts his head up. He glances around, a habitual check on his surroundings, and then he looks down at her.

“You’re awake,” he croaks. He clears his throat, wipes his hand across his mouth, straightens and shifts in his chair. “Christ,” he mutters. “Jesus _Christ_ , Vera, you scared the living daylights out of me.” She tries to speak, but her mouth is dry. Philip shakes his head and puts two fingers to her lips. “Don’t try to talk just yet. Just rest, alright?” He smiles down at her, but it’s strained. Perhaps nobody else would notice it, but she does. There’s a tension in him, a certain tightness to his lips and around his eyes. It’s not just tiredness, which is all anyone else is likely to see. There’s something else hiding behind his eyes. She’s too worn out to decipher it. “They let me stay until you were awake,” he goes on, “but they’ll throw me out soon.”

Vera tries to speak again. It’s not just her mouth that’s dry, though: her throat is parched, rasping. Philip reaches to one side, brings a glass of water into sight, holds it to her lips as she lifts her head enough to take a sip. It’s hardly dignified; water spills down the corners of her mouth, down her chin, and after a moment she has to sink back down into the pillow, closing her eyes against the throb in her head. But she has managed a little, and a dry mouth and throat is no longer a barrier to speech.

“How long?” she asks.

“I found you last night. They operated just after midnight, and it’s…” Philip pauses, perhaps glancing up at the clock. “It’s five in the morning, now.”

She opens her eyes again. “You’ve been…all night,” she guesses. He’s wearing the same clothes he was this morning…yesterday morning, now, she supposes. He’s rumpled, his hair not the only part of him that’s dishevelled, and she wonders what it means. She should know, she should be able to grasp the meaning of it, but she’s so _tired_. She’s been drugged, she supposes. An anaesthetic. Perhaps morphine, too. It will wear off, but not soon enough to parse the strange expression Philip is wearing now. Brows drawn together, a faint scowl pulling at his mouth, his eyes intent as he leans forward and clasps her hand between his.

“Of course I’ve been here all night,” he says, as if it’s something that she shouldn’t need to question. “Where else would I be?” She stares at him. After a moment Philip shakes his head, the indecipherable expression sliding into visible frustration. He expels a breath and leans back, releasing her hand again. She wishes he hadn’t; she wishes she could take back whatever she showed that has irritated him. “Christ, Vera,” he mutters. “What is it going to take?”

He doesn’t explain himself, and Vera can’t push him, not just because she’s in no physical state to do so but because they’re interrupted. The door swings open and in bustles a nurse, uniform starched and hair scraped back under a cap.

“Now, Mr Lombard, I let you stay here so long as you came and got me as soon as she woke,” she scolds. Philip’s lips compress into a thin line, but in a moment the irritation is wiped away, and he presents something different to the nurse. Charm and gratitude and relief all drawn together into a perfectly formed character. It amuses Vera, but not enough to keep her attention. The throbbing in her head is growing worse, and the rest of her is beginning to hurt too, the stabbing in her ribs when she breathes deeply joined by a pain in her abdomen, deep inside. She loses focus on their conversation, distracted by the pain and by wondering what damage she has done to herself. They talk a little, Philip and the nurse, but she lets it wash over her until it becomes clear that Philip is being ejected.

“He’ll be back this afternoon, I’m sure,” the nurse reassures her. “Visiting times are from three until six-thirty, Mr Lombard. Off you go. Have a rest and something to eat, and she’ll be right here when you get back.” She’s implacable, hands on her hips. Vera can imagine how hard Philip fought to stay with her during the night. At least, she likes to think she can imagine it. Had he charmed them, or bullied them? Either way, he’d achieved his aim. Of course he’d been here, he’d said. Where else would he be? Vera isn’t sure. There are two creatures inhabiting her body. One says that she must not trust Philip, reminds her that she has never been able to keep anything she wants and that Philip, too, will one day leave her. Just like everybody else. It’s a voice she has clung to, these past months, to try to keep some scrap of herself safe from him. But the other voice…the other voice murmurs, insidiously, that she already knows he cares for her but this, this shows more than affection, this shows _love_. This voice whispers that she is safe, that she is wanted. She has tried to quash that voice but now it is growing louder. Half-drugged, utterly weary, and warmed by Philip’s presence, Vera’s defences are ripped to shreds, and she wonders if perhaps it’s no longer important to hold her heart back from him.

Philip leans over the bed and kisses Vera’s forehead. “I’ll be back later, darling,” he promises. “At three.” Vera hums a note in response, and manages a faint smile when he cups her face in his hands and kisses her mouth. Gently, as if she’ll shatter if he’s not careful. She wonders what she had looked like when he’d found her, to make him treat her so gently now. “You rest,” he says, a final admonition delivered with another kiss to her forehead. Vera can’t remember him ever showing such affection so openly, in front of others. She has truly scared him. The knowledge of that should make her pleased. She should exult in the proof that he cares enough to be scared. And she _is_ pleased, though the feeling is muted beneath fatigue. She treasures these signs that she was right to take such drastic measures, she was _right_ to do anything to keep them together. She was right to kill their unborn child before it could come between them, because these affectionate gestures, this frantic worry…it all points to the suggestion that his feelings are stronger than she has allowed herself to believe. And if he does, if he loves her too…

It will all have been worth it, if he loves her too.

The nurse, whose name slips from Vera’s mind at once, fusses over her and makes her drink a little more water. She gives Vera more morphine, tells her that the doctor will come to see her later, and offers the use of a bedpan, which Vera declines, even though the nurse says she’s not to get out of bed for at least the next few days. At last Vera is left alone again, and it’s not long before she falls asleep again as the morphine does its job. She floats away, pain-free, into a dreamless sleep that lasts until she’s woken for breakfast, some hours later. Then she sees a doctor, who speaks to her with such condescension that it makes Vera’s jaw hurt from gritting her teeth so hard.

She lost the baby, of course. Vera isn’t sorry, though she feigns it. She pretends shock and distress, borrowing a dozen different physical tics from other people. She cries crocodile tears and dries her eyes on a handkerchief offered by the nurse. The doctor, discomfited by her display, hurries away after telling her he’ll come back to explain everything when her husband arrives. Vera lets her tears dry up slowly, and accepts the cup of hot cocoa that she’s brought. She’s allowed to sit propped up in bed to drink it, which hurts more than she anticipates, but the nurse assures her that it’s normal after the kind of experience she’s had.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs Lombard,” she adds. “Did you know…?”

“No,” denies Vera. “No, I had no idea.”

They move her into a ward after lunch. It’s not large, six beds including the one Vera occupies, but it’s noisier and busier than the side room, and Vera’s glad to close her eyes and pretend to be asleep. She doesn’t want to talk to any of these women, she doesn’t want to talk to the nurse who comes at regular intervals to check on her. She wants solitude, she wants silence. The only person she wants is Philip, and he can’t return until three. The clock moves slowly. Vera’s feigned sleep becomes a nap; she’s woken from it when the ward doors open and a little crowd of laughing, cheerful visitors come in.

But Philip isn’t among them. All the visitors are strangers. He isn’t here.

Every time the door opens, she looks for him, unable to keep the hope from rising whenever the handle is rattled and the door swung open, and every time he is absent. He’d said he would return at three, but he’s not here. Quarter past three arrives, then half past three, and still no Philip. It’s not like him; he’s usually so diligent about time-keeping. Vera begins to worry, and though there’s no specific root of it, no particular fear snagging at her thoughts, still she worries. The clock ticks on until he’s an hour late, and meanwhile other visitors come and go at a near-constant rate. The sister-in-law of the woman in the bed next to her gives Vera a magazine, with a cheerful smile and an off-hand comment of ‘we’re all done with it’. Vera leafs through the pages without taking any of it in. Her head hurts. Her abdomen hurts, and her vagina. She worries about Philip, about what his absence might mean. She doesn’t dwell on the possibility that he won’t come back, because he’d promised, but there are all manner of things could be making him late, or that might prevent him from coming entirely. Philip’s life is not a safe one.

But at last he comes, at nearly twenty past four when Vera is being given some more pain relief. Not morphine this time, just a couple of tablets, but she’s assured it will help. She swallows the tablets down, glances up, and suddenly there he is. Philip, his hair smoothed back into neatness and his suit clean and pressed. He’s holding the door open for the person after him, so Vera has a moment to appreciate his presence. He looks handsome in that suit, but it’s more than that, more than the mere physical sight of him, though that’s always a pleasure. It’s the way something loosens within her, some knot of tension that she hadn’t realised was there. It’s the realisation that she’s no longer alone, neither here in this hospital ward nor in the wider world. Philip is with her. The longer she has known him, the more she’s been able to trust that he keeps his promises. He’s promised to keep her safe, he’s said he can’t imagine wanting to leave her, and she’s finally able to trust that he means what he says. She’s not alone any longer. She has Philip. He’s hers, and she’s his, and she _trusts_ him.

She has gone through some kind of alchemical process, this last day or so. She feels…not new, not different, but somehow evolved, as if with the shedding of her blood she has shed the last of her fears and doubts. She has discarded an old skin, old defences that she no longer needs with Philip. He’s been so patient with her. He’s scratched the truth out of her even when she hadn’t been willing to give it up, and she’s hated him for that at times, but she thinks that things can be different now. She knows he won’t leave her, because he cares for her. Perhaps he even loves her, as she’d thought this morning when she’d realised how worried he’d been about her. She has him, and she trusts him, and she loves him.

But then Philip turns and meets her eyes, and it’s as if she’s plunged into ice-cold water. All thoughts of trust, of caring and of _love_ , are flung far out of her mind, and she’s left with gut-churning fear.

It isn’t that he looks angry. Not on the surface, at least. Nobody else will be able to tell, from a casual glance, that he’s angry. No, Vera thinks, not just angry. He’s _furious_. His mouth is relaxed, his steps towards the bed not hastened by emotion of any kind. But his eyes…his eyes are dark, and so horribly blank. There’s no emotion there at all, just the coldness that conceals the depths of his anger. Hiding his fury behind detachment. He’s looked at her like this before. Not often, but every time it scares her just the same. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid of him, when he’s like this. He is every inch a killer, a panther clothed in soft velvet but with deadly claws and fangs hidden just out of sight.

Oh God, Vera thinks. He knows. He must know; it’s the only explanation for the terrible rage that’s boiling beneath his skin. He’s been home, to sleep and to change, and he must have seen the blood. Not just at the bottom of the stairs, where he’d found her, but on the landing above, too. She hadn’t thought of that before. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’s normally so careful, she’s _always_ been so careful, but this time, of all times, she has made a mistake and forgotten that there was blood at the top of the stairs, too. She can remember the stain it made, blood dripping down her thighs onto the carpet. It won’t clean off; they’ll have to rip it up. Philip is coming closer. She’s in the corner of the ward, furthest from the door, but it will only take him a few more paces to be at her bedside. Oh God, she thinks again. He _knows_.

“Darling.” He bends down and kisses her forehead, lips brushing against the edge of a cut on her temple. Vera hadn’t really registered it before now; it must have happened when she’d fallen down the stairs. She has a dim memory of blood trickling into her eyes. It hasn’t needed stitches, anyway, nor a bandage, so it can’t be bad. But Philip is always deliberate, and she knows it’s no accident that he kisses her there now. She can’t quite suppress a shiver. She’s not in full control of her responses, right now. Pain and drugs and fear are a potent combination, robbing her of the composure she needs in the face of his cold, dangerous anger. “You’re looking a little better,” he adds. “How are you feeling?” He perches on the edge of the bed, every inch the concerned husband. Vera can’t meet his eyes.

“Quite a bit of pain,” she murmurs. “Particularly when I sit up. They say that’s normal.”

“I imagine so.”

She can’t read anything in his voice, his tone too smooth, too even. But she doesn’t dare look up at him to see if there’s anything betrayed by his expression, too afraid of seeing that horrible dark stare that hides such dangerous anger. Everything that she’s been through over the past few weeks, everything that she’s done…it will all be unravelled now, every secret action she’s taken, every lie of omission. Philip won’t rest until he has it all, and then…

He won’t stand her lying to him. That’s the deal-breaker, and she’s always known it. Every time he’s grown angry with her, or almost every time, it’s been because she’s lied to him. And now he knows she’s lied to him, in deed if not in words. All her scheming, all her pain, may well have been for nothing.

But, she reminds herself, so far it can’t be anything more than a _suspicion_. He can’t know, despite his anger, despite the blood on the landing. They haven’t been able to talk yet, so he can’t _know_ , not for certain. She’s sure he suspects, sure he has put all the facts together and come up with the right answer, but perhaps there’s still a chance for her to deny it, to change the story. She could have started bleeding on the landing, grown dizzy from it, and fallen. Women have spontaneous miscarriages. These things happen. But Philip always sees through her lies. Always. Vera’s head aches, and her ribs ache, and her sprained wrist is throbbing under the bandaging they’ve put around it. She can’t think straight. Not with pain nagging at her, not with strangers all around in the ward.

She risks a glance up at him and finds him staring back at her, fathomless anger coiling behind those dark eyes. She can’t lie to him. She’s barely got away with it over the past few weeks, since Mattie told her the news, and now, with the evidence of her misdeeds in their home and marked onto Vera’s body…now there’s no way she can escape his notice. Philip will tear the truth from her, and he won’t be kind about it, so the truth that Vera had hoped to share with him must be hidden deep, deep inside. She can’t tell him, she knows. Not now. She doesn’t know exactly why he’s so angry, whether it’s the lie she’d tried to create by falling down the stairs, or the way she had endangered herself by going to an abortionist, or the destruction of their child. No, she doesn’t know why he’s angry, but whatever the cause, it doesn’t matter. All her instincts scream at her to hide away her vulnerabilities. Hide away her feelings.

“Off the bed, sir, if you _don’t_ mind,” snaps the head nurse as she comes bustling up to Vera’s bed. “We have chairs by the door, for visitors.” She stares down her nose at Philip until he obeys her, rising to his feet but not making any move towards the door. “Mr Lombard, is it?” the nurse guesses. “I’ll fetch the doctor.” She turns and walks away again, and Vera makes a face at her back, secure in the knowledge that only Philip is likely to see it. But he doesn’t chuckle, isn’t amused by her display of distaste. He stands beside the bed like a sentry, hands in his trouser pockets, head turned as he watches the nurse’s progress across the ward and then out of the door. Vera manages not to shiver, this time, but it’s a close thing. Still, when Philip at last looks back down at her, she’s managed to scrape together some composure.

“If the doctor’s coming back, I’d like to sit up,” she says to him. “Would you help me?” He nods and, without saying a word, slides his arm beneath her head and then under her shoulders, levering her carefully up. There are extra pillows beside the bed, and he puts them behind her until she’s propped up, not quite sitting upright but good enough for now. Something twinges inside her body, a slight pull somewhere that reminds her of the damage she’s done to herself. She ignores it. “Thank you.”

He’s still bent over her. He draws the blanket a little higher up and tucks her in carefully. Anybody watching will see a devoted, concerned husband, but Vera knows better. She can’t push him away from her, can’t brush off his ministrations because it will look wrong if she does, but she _wants_ to push him away, because she knows the truth underneath his façade. She knows any concern he has for her is tempered by his fury. It won’t come out now. Nothing will be said now, while they’re in public. Philip is far too careful, far too controlled, to let his guard down now, when there are other people around. No, it will happen later on, once she’s released from hospital. Once they’re home together, then his anger will be given free rein.

Vera can only hope that when she knows the cause of his anger, she may find some argument or defence to fight back with. This not knowing, this suspense, is almost worse than the feeling of being hunted that she has whenever she catches his eye and sees that coldness in him.

She’s not prey, not ever, not even for him, but until she knows what she’s fighting, there’s no way she can’t fight back, and the helplessness of her position is going to be difficult to endure.

“Mr Lombard? I’m Doctor Johnson.” It’s a different doctor than the one Vera saw earlier. This one is older, and wears experience like a mantle of confidence in his whole bearing. He shakes Philip’s hand and then pulls the curtains around the bed. It’s a futile attempt at privacy, no more than an illusion. “How are you feeling, Mrs Lombard?” Johnson asks her.

“I’ve felt better,” she admits.

“I’m not surprised.” He glances at Philip, and then back at Vera. She can see him formulating an expression of sympathy, as fake as any of her own masks. Or perhaps not quite fake, but not _genuine_. It’s a professional sympathy, detached from real feeling, proffered because it’s expected. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he tells her. “I gather you didn’t know you were expecting.”

“No,” says Philip, before Vera can spin out a lie. He’s looking at her, not at Johnson, his jaw set and his eyebrows drawn together in a frown. “No, we didn’t know.” He’s daring her, she realises. Daring her to lie, or daring her to tell the truth, or both. It doesn’t matter; either she’ll admit she’s lied to him, or she’ll lie now. There is no winning here, and she knows it. Mouth dry, she shakes her head, a deliberately vague gesture that leaves her answer open to interpretation. Philip’s jaw tightens. She knows what he’s thinking; she sees the fury boiling up beneath his skin. But he can’t do anything here, and they both know it. He can’t even _say_ anything. Will that make it worse, she wonders, when he can finally let it out? She doesn’t know. Possibly. Like steam building up until finally it finds a vent.

“You told the doctors last night that you found your wife at the bottom of the stairs,” Johnson says to Philip, whose expression is wiped blank when he looks back at the doctor. “Is that right?” Philip nods, and Johnson glances between them, as if he’s watching for something. “Mrs Lombard, do you remember what happened?”

Vera hesitates. She’s aware of Philip watching her, his eyes sharp, his whole focus on her. He’s waiting for the lies. And of course, all Vera can do now is lie. She can’t tell the truth, not to Philip and not to the doctor. Abortion is a crime. If she’s accused of it, if medical evidence points to it, if Philip doesn’t back her up…

But people always believe her lies, and she doesn’t think Philip is angry enough to want her to end up in jail, or worse.

“I went upstairs to change,” she says slowly, as if she’s forcing herself to remember, as if the memories are only just within reach. “I washed, and put on clean clothes…I’d been soaked through, walking home. And then I went to come downstairs, and…I suppose I fainted.” She looks up at Johnson, painting herself with confusion and innocence. “I remember being at the bottom,” she adds. “But I don’t remember falling.”

Johnson frowns faintly, pursing his lips as he looks at her. “Well, most of your injuries are consistent with a fall,” he agrees. “You’ve broken several ribs, and sprained your wrist and ankle. Rest and time will sort those out. The cut on your head will heal up nicely. But…” Johnson trails off, as if he can’t decide whether to go on. Vera reaches out for Philip. It takes him a moment, but then he puts his hand in hers and squeezes gently. It’s fake, it’s all a show, but some part of her is still reassured by how carefully he holds her hand, and by the way he takes a step closer to the bed.

“But what, doctor?” Philip questions. There’s just the right amount of concern in his voice.

“Some of your wife’s injuries…we wouldn’t expect them from a fall,” Johnson says evasively. Philip tilts his head and Vera feigns confusion. “There was a little internal damage, a lot of blood loss…do you remember anything more about it, Mrs Lombard?” She shakes her head. Philip’s grip on her hand tightens, almost painfully, but she doesn’t let it show, and Johnson doesn’t notice. “Are you sure?” he presses. “You didn’t have a fall before, or notice any bleeding?”

“No, nothing,” she says. Johnson is silent. Philip, too. It makes the rest of the ward, screened from view by the curtains, seem even louder. But it won’t take much to sell the lie, not to Johnson, who has no reason, beyond a few inconsistencies in her injuries, to suspect her of misbehaviour. She lets her eyes fill with tears. Most men can’t bear to see a woman crying. It’s a valuable weapon and she doesn’t hesitate to use it now. “I don’t remember,” she whispers. “I just…I can’t believe this has happened.” She blinks. A tear trickles down her cheek.

“Don’t upset yourself, darling,” says Philip, bending over her, smoothing her hair back from her face and wiping the tear away. He’s so good at this when he wants to be, pretending to be something he isn’t. Not as good as her, but good enough to fool most people. Usually he doesn’t bother, usually he just makes the world take him for what he is, hiding only the illegality of his work, but sometimes he lies almost as well as her. His tenderness now, the softness in his voice, the fleeting touch of his finger on her cheek…these are lies. Vera knows that. He can’t conceal the darkness inside, the anger. Not from her. She has to remember that, to force herself to keep seeing it, because forgetting won’t do her any good. “Dr Johnson, what are you suggesting?” he demands, straightening and turning back to the doctor. “I found her at the bottom of the stairs. Look at the state of her, she’s bruised all over. What else are you suggesting happened?” His accent has thickened. He’s every inch a fighting Irishman, of the kind that dwell throughout Brooklyn, and it’s enough to make Johnson hold up his hands in apology.

“Nothing, Mr Lombard,” he backs down. “Nothing at all. Sometimes these things happen, I guess. Medical science can’t explain everything yet.” Vera wipes another tear from her cheek, blinks more out of her eyes. Yes, she thinks. Believe the lie. Accept it, swallow it down. “You were lucky, really,” Johnson adds. “That kind of a fall, you could have done all sorts of damage.”

“She’s lost our child,” Philip says. “I think that’s damage enough.”

Vera’s breath catches in her throat. It’s not a pretence, this time, the sob that chokes her for a moment. There’s anger in his voice, and _pain_ , and she hates hearing it. She hates the suggestion that perhaps he would have wanted the child. She hates him for thinking he might have wanted it, because even if he’d not left her, even if he’d stayed and loved the child, she still would have lost him because she can’t _love_ like that. Her emotions are too distorted. She has wanted and lusted, she has felt pity and scorn and excitement, but love? Love has rarely entered her life. And before Philip, it had never been real. She knows that now, because nothing else compares to the way she feels for Philip. Nobody else compares. She could never love a child the way a mother should, and eventually, she’s certain, Philip and the child both would grow to resent her for it. To _hate_ her for it.

She’d done what she had to do, to keep Philip. Her careful plans have come to naught because something had gone wrong, and because there is blood on the landing carpet to prove her guilt, but Vera will play the cards she’s dealt, as she always has. If she’s destroyed everything, then she will survive. Somehow she’ll survive. Still, there’s no point thinking about that yet. Until she can get out of hospital, until Philip lays his own cards on the table, there’s nothing she can do but accept his façade and offer one of her own.

“I’m alright, Philip,” she says to him, keeping her voice soft, tremulous. “I’m sorry, doctor. I don’t remember anything else. Just…pain.” Philip doesn’t turn back towards her, but his hand jerks a little, as if he wants to reach out for her again. It’s an unusual lapse of control. She wonders if it’s from concern or anger. “I’m very tired,” she murmurs. It’s not untrue; despite her nap earlier, she feels worn out. The pills she’d been given by the nurse aren’t nearly as effective as the morphine. The twinge, deep inside, has become a more insistent pain. Her ribs hurt more, too. She wants to lie down again; it had been less painful, like that. “Doctor, when can I go home?” she asks, wincing as she tries to shift herself into a slightly more comfortable position. At once Philip is bent over the bed, easing a pillow from behind her back, supporting her as she lays a little flatter. “I want to go home,” she says, to him and the doctor and to herself. She has never been an inpatient in a hospital before, but she already knows that she loathes it. Even going home, even facing Philip’s anger, would be better than the enforced helplessness of being here, trapped in a hospital bed unable to _do_ anything.

“I’d like you to stay at least two weeks,” Johnson says. Vera can’t disguise her look of horror, and he smiles at her, indulgent. “Think of it as a rest, Mrs Lombard,” he says. “A little vacation away from home, hm? I’m sure Mr Lombard can manage without you for that long.”

“Of course,” Philip agrees. He catches Vera’s eye, and she forces herself to meet his gaze levelly. There’s something faintly sarcastic about his tone of voice and the tilt of his eyebrow. Johnson won’t see it, but Vera knows Philip better. She knows all the little quirks of his expression, all the timbres of his voice, and though she can’t always understand what he’s feeling or thinking, she can always see the subtle undercurrents that seem to escape everyone else’s notice. “I don’t want her coming home a minute before she’s well enough.”

There’s a threat in his words, concealed beneath concern and affection, evident only to her. She manages a smile and pretends she isn’t chilled to the bone by what he’s implying. Johnson is saying something about resting even when she’s home, that she must not get out of bed in the meantime, that they’ll take the bandages off in a week or so…it washes over her, too distant to be truly irritating. Philip doesn’t hit women; he’s said so before. But he’s come close with her, a time or two. He has hurt her physically, once or twice. She knows he’d spoken the truth when he’d told her he didn’t hit women, that night when she’d sat on the stairs desperately hoping that he would come back to her. He hadn’t been lying. He hadn’t let his anger spin out of control, had left before he could do worse than knock the breath out of her. Afterwards he’d apologised. It had been a lapse, and not a serious one. His temper had sparked, but he’d kept his hands to himself nonetheless.

He’s still in control of himself now, but given another two weeks to stew and brood and let his anger grow even more firmly rooted, Vera isn’t sure he will be able to keep himself under such a tight leash. She doesn’t have enough experience to be able to judge. Always before his anger has been a passing storm, furious and violent in its way but never lasting longer than a few hours. Now he will have days, weeks, without giving vent to it, and she can’t help wondering if that pressure will explode. If it will break his self-imposed prohibition against harming women.

There’s not a thing she can do to defend herself against him. Not a single thing. She is wholly defenceless, emotionally and physically. He can rip her to shreds if he wants, he could wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze, he could hit her or hate her or leave her, and there’s nothing she can do to stop him. Not even giving him the truth will stop his anger now, because she’s lied to him, and he knows she’s lied, and it’s the only thing he will never accept from her. Nausea makes her stomach churn. She is afraid, and hates herself for it. She hates herself for being afraid of Philip. But hasn’t she always been afraid? Isn’t that why she’s never disclosed the truth that she’s hidden so far into the darkness of her heart? If she hadn’t been afraid, she would have told him she loves him.

She hates herself, and she hates him, and she closes her eyes and vows that she will not be destroyed by this. She will not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter three will be posted tomorrow.


	3. Chapter 3

In the end it’s closer to three weeks before Vera is deemed well enough to leave the hospital.

She argues against the prolonged stay, but can’t deny, at the two week mark, that she’s still in more pain than she can easily manage. After two weeks in hospital, she has still not been able to walk unaided to the ward bathroom, and the doctors don’t want her to go until she can manage it. So she stays another four days, grits her teeth and bears the inane chatter of the other patients, the patronisation of the staff, and the insufferable lack of solitude. She forces herself to conquer the pain until, on the fifth day, she manages the walk to the toilet several times and insists on going home.

They discharge her with a paper bag full of medication, a list of things she shouldn’t attempt by herself for the foreseeable future, and a follow-up appointment for a month’s time. A nurse pushes her in a wheelchair to the hospital’s front door, where Philip meets her with the car. He smiles at the nurse, helps Vera into the car, and doesn’t look straight at her for more than a second or two.

He’s been like that for nineteen days. Ever since he’d come to the ward that first time, full of volcanic fury. After that visit, he hasn’t let her catch his eye, nor allowed his gaze to linger on her. He’s visited every day for at least half an hour, but all his conversation has been carefully constructed, utterly artificial, touching on nothing personal. He’s brought her magazines, chocolates, fruit, her own nightclothes and toothbrush, anything she might want. He’s asked how she is and never rises to the bait of her lie when she says she’s fine. He’s been both considerate and indifferent, bringing her things to make her comfortable but acting like it’s some duty to come and sit beside her, day after day, one eye on the clock. Spewing inanities as if he isn’t who he is, and she isn’t who she is. It’s like this is some chore for him, as if he isn’t her Philip and she isn’t his Vera. As if the past months of living together as husband and wife have been meaningless.

And of course it _is_ meaningless. It’s a lie built on falsehoods and forgeries. It hasn’t mattered to her in months, the fact that their marriage is a lie. The ring on her finger is as false as the marriage certificate he’d had faked, back in England. It hasn’t mattered because she has let the fiction become a reality. She has become Mrs Lombard, and she’d thought he felt the same: that even if the foundation is a sham, they have built something _real_ between them. It’s unbearable now to have him treat her as if she doesn’t matter to him. Oh, he livens up if anyone seems to notice that the silences between them have dragged out a little too long, he’s always greeted her with ‘darling’ and a kiss that lingers a moment too long to be casual, but she knows just how little it means. She knows what lurks behind these tiny crumbs of attention.

He hasn’t been her only visitor. It’s surprised her, and touched her, as much as she can be touched by such gestures. Bridget Bell from next door has been twice, bringing spring flowers from her garden. Peggy and Mattie from the surgery, the former twice and the latter, briefly, just the once. They’ve both passed messages from Dr Cartland, assuring her that her job will be waiting for her once she’s recovered. Vera can’t say she precisely enjoys their company, these women who come to visit her. Still, Bridget is tactful enough not to talk about what happened, Peggy is compassionate without forcing it on her, and Mattie keeps up a steady stream of gossip for the fifteen minutes or so that she spends at Vera’s bedside. It’s far from the worst company Vera has ever had, and it’s a distraction from the nagging pain and the fear of what will happen when Vera goes home.

Philip is the only visitor who has mattered, though. Philip is the only _person_ who matters. And now, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, his silence echoing in her ears, Vera steels herself for the battle that surely lies ahead of her. It isn’t far, even in New York traffic, but every minute feels like an hour. Sunshine bathes the buildings with golden light and Brooklyn seems to be bursting with life, but Vera is cold. A small voice in the back of her mind reminds her of another drive she’d taken with Philip, many months ago, out into the winding country roads of Devon. She remembers pulling up her skirt so his hand came to rest on her garters and bare leg. She remembers wondering if he was going to take her off somewhere and kill her after having his fill of her; an idle thought, dismissed as soon as it formed in her mind. It’s not so easy to dismiss now. He has nearly three weeks’ worth of pent up anger inside him, anger that rages just as fiercely now as it had that first day.

No, Vera can’t deny her fear. She can’t deny that she’s afraid of what he’ll say, what he’ll _do_. She can’t help wondering whether, in the fierceness of his anger, he’ll forget or ignore his own self-imposed limits. ‘ _I won’t hurt women,_ ’ he’d said to her once. How much would it take for him to ignore that? She has no idea.

“Stay there,” Philip advises her, as he pulls up in front of the house and turns off the engine. “I’ll open the door, then carry you up.”

“I can walk,” Vera murmurs. Philip meets her gaze for once, his mouth twisted and eyebrow lifted in a withering expression. She swallows, nods, looks away as he gets out of the car and goes to open the front door. He comes back for her suitcase and the paper bag filled with medications, and then he opens the passenger door and scoops her up. One arm beneath her knees, the other under her shoulders, bridal style. He carries her up the steps and into the house as if she weighs nothing. She does weigh less than she had three weeks ago, she knows. It’s not just the physical loss of the baby making her body slowly revert back to the way it was; she’s had no appetite, these past few weeks. Under the watchful gaze of the nurses in the hospital, she’s pecked at her meals and been uninterested in any of it. Even the sweets and chocolates that Philip brought her haven’t been appealing.

He doesn’t pause in the hallway, except to kick the door shut behind him. He takes her up the stairs, and she tucks her head against his shoulder and says not a word when her elbow knocks against the wall, the stairwell too small for this to be easy. Then into the bedroom, where he puts her down onto the bed with a care that she hadn’t expected. She’d assumed, once they were home and in private, that his feelings would be given vent. She hadn’t expected him to be careful, nor his hands to be gentle when he helps her to sit on the edge of the bed. And yet still he doesn’t look at her, and still he speaks no more than the bare minimum. She props herself up in the bed and watches as he turns and leaves, saying he’ll make them some coffee.

Vera doesn’t want coffee. She wants this out in the open. The wound purged, the infection drained away.

She can’t stay on the bed, or in their bedroom. It makes her too vulnerable. She toes off her shoes, kicks them under the bed out of habit. Not the bedroom, then, but that means going downstairs, and she hasn’t tackled stairs yet. She wonders if she can manage it. She’s meant to be resting, should be changing into her nightdress and lying down on the bed, but she can’t possibly rest now. Her whole body feels like it’s thrumming with anticipation, her nerves jangling, every instinct telling her to run, to escape, to evade notice. Fight or flight. But she can’t flee; she _won’t_ flee. She has come too far to give up Philip without a fight, even if it means fighting him. She has fought every day of her life, one way or another. No, she won’t flee now. She suppresses her instincts and pushes herself upright, onto her feet.

Discomfort nags at her chest where her broken ribs are still healing, and she takes a moment to breathe, to steady herself. But a moment is all she needs; the ribs are mending, as is the rest of her body. Her sprained wrist only twinges at certain movements. The cut on her head is barely even a scab any more. Internally, the damage will take longer to heal. Some damage will never be undone, and she hopes…oh, Vera hopes that she hasn’t damaged this relationship with Philip beyond repairing. But it can’t mend until the wound is excised, so she walks to the bedroom door and steps onto the landing.

She gets no further.

It isn’t pain that stops her, nor Philip, but shock. She hasn’t given it a great deal of thought over the past days, that blood stain on the landing that had betrayed her to Philip. She supposes now, staring at it, that she’d thought Philip would get rid of it. It’s evidence of her crime, after all, and if he’d meant to turn her in to the police, he would have done it when the opportunity arose. He’d have denied Vera’s story when Dr Johnson asked, when the carpet, the blood, would be his proof against her. So when she’d thought about it, the blood soaked into the carpet so deeply that it would never scrubbed out…when she’d thought about it at all, she’d assumed that Philip would rip up the carpet. Strip the landing and stairs back to floorboards. Get rid of the evidence. Instead he’s left it there, a stark reminder of what she’s done. A reminder that he _knows_ what she’s done.

Vera stares at it now, the rust-brown stain that’s spread across the landing and leads down the stairs. She remembers crouching there, keeling over and fainting. The blood, hot and sticky, gushing from between her legs. The knowledge that nobody would hear her, nobody knew she was there, curled in on herself, the pain so unbearable she thought it would kill her. The choice she had made to pull herself upright, fighting against the agony, so that she could fling herself down the stairs.  

She goes back into the bedroom and stands at the window, staring out but seeing nothing. Hearing nothing. All she can think of, all she can see, is that blood stain.

Then a hand falls onto her shoulder, and she’s startled out of her reverie. Philip has returned; there are two steaming cups of coffee on the chest of drawers in the corner. She hadn’t heard a thing, though she doubts he was trying to be quiet. He’s looking down at her, eyebrows drawn together just slightly in a frown, his mouth a firm, thin line. Oh, he’s angry. She can see it in him, behind his eyes. That terrible, cold anger that had scared her so much in the hospital, and that still scares her now. She wants to flinch away from it, from him, but his fingers tighten on her shoulder before she can, as if he’s read her mind and knows that she wants distance between them.

“You should be in bed,” he tells her.

Vera shakes her head and shrugs her free shoulder. “I’ve been in bed enough,” she murmurs. “It’s nice standing for a while.” He’s holding her still. She wants to get away from it, but she needs to wait. She needs to pretend there’s nothing to be afraid of, because if he scents fear, he’ll tear her throat out.

“You were miles away, just now,” he says. So terribly controlled, his tone casual, the anger still suppressed beneath the surface. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere,” she says. His grasp on her shoulder tightens even more, until his fingers are digging into her flesh. He’ll leave bruises. Vera scrambles to defend herself. “I was going to the bathroom, but I saw the blood,” she offers. “I thought…”

“You thought I’d get rid of it,” Philip guesses. She nods. “I thought I’d leave it where it was until we had a chance to…talk.” There’s a twist to his mouth as he sneers that last word. The anger, the fury, is beginning to bleed out from beneath the cool surface.

Lie, she commands herself. She must lie as if her life depends upon it. Maybe it does.

She blinks up at him, paints confusion in wide eyes and parted lips. “Talk?” she echoes. “Talk about what? I suppose we could put a new carpet down, but if the floorboards are sound –,”

“Jesus _Christ_ , Vera!” he exclaims. He’s so loud it’s almost a shout, and it makes Vera jump which, in turn, makes her ribs complain. She presses a hand to her side, winces as if the pain is greater than it is. She will use any advantage she can get, and she thinks Philip doesn’t like to see her in pain. Even furious as he is, he still doesn’t like seeing it. He lets go of her shoulder, and when she glances up at him she can see him reining back his anger. Jaw clenched, eyes hooded. He takes a step away from her, quite deliberately, and folds his arms across his chest. Hands out of action, Vera notes. Restraining himself, just in case she pushes him towards violence? Perhaps.

Lie, she thinks. _Lie_. But no words spring into her mouth. No tale twists itself through her mind. Denial is easy; denial and obfuscation. But she has no lies to give him now. She is frozen into silence by fear and desperation, and by the habit he’s slowly been creating in her of telling him the truth. All these weeks and months he’s insisted on the truth, he’s shoved aside her masks and deceits and pretences, and now when she most needs to lie…now she can’t do it.

Philip takes a deep breath, and exhales through his nostrils. “Stop trying to lie to me,” he tells her. “It never works and it’s just going to piss me off.”

She looks him in the eye. “I don’t know what you mean,” she claims. His eyes flash, his lip curls, but she clings to it, to this pathetic falsehood that nobody alive would fall for. Denial is the only pretence she has left. What happened to the woman who lied in under oath in a courtroom, she demands of herself. What has happened to her? He’s done this to her, he’s stripped her down to her bones and made her into something different. She hates him, oh she _hates_ him. And she hates herself for letting him do it, piece by piece ripped away because she was stupid enough to fall in love with him.

“Think very carefully, Vera,” Philip says, quiet now, every word spoken with great deliberation. “I’ll give you one more chance to come clean. Tell me what you did?” Vera shakes her head, clings to her pretence of confusion. Philip explodes into action. He unfolds his arms, fists one hand, turns, and with the other hand he seizes one of the cups of coffee and throws it against the wall. The china cup shatters; coffee splatters against the wall and onto the carpet. Vera flinches, but stands her ground. “Tell me!” he demands. “Tell me what happened!”

“I fell down the stairs,” she manages. “It – I must have fainted, it was – an accident –,”

It was the wrong word to use; she knows that the moment it crosses her lips. An accident. Just like Matron Lucas. Like Cyril. Philip knows too many of her secrets to believe it, and now she does fall back a pace, cold chills running down her spine and fear a lead weight in her stomach. She’s never been able to lie to him. Oh, why must he always know when she’s lying? Nobody else ever has. Nobody else in her whole life has been able to tell, just by looking at her or listening to the inflection of her voice or the words she uses. Nobody but Philip.

“Oh, I know all about your _accidents_ ,” he scorns. He matches her step backwards with one of his own, forwards. Not coming any closer to her than before, but not letting her put distance between them, either. He’s so angry. So, so angry. She’d been right, when she’d worried that three weeks would let his anger boil, would let it build up pressure until it exploded. But why is he so angry? She can’t understand _why_. “There was blood at the top of the stairs,” he reminds her. “I know you didn’t fall down the _fucking stairs!_ ” He’s seething with rage now, chest heaving, his whole body practically vibrating with it. “So tell me – tell me what the _fuck_ you thought you were doing when you killed our child!”

“I wasn’t –,”

“Tell me one more lie,” he hisses. “I _dare_ you!” Now he does close the gap between them, two or three strides bringing him right in front of her even when she scrambles back to try to escape. He crowds her against the wall, braces his hands against the wall on either side of her, holds her captive between his arms. Vera tries to fight him. She hits his chest and claws at his face. Her nails connect, just briefly. Philip swears, and tries to grab hold of her arms to keep her still, but she’s frenzied with the need to get away, and she fights with every ounce of strength she has. It’s not enough; even if she wasn’t recovering, she doesn’t have the strength to defeat Philip. She can scratch and hit and kick him, and she does, but he bats away her hands, and kicking his legs with her bare feet only hurts her. She tries to knee him in the groin, but he presses her back against the wall, giving her no room to move. Her meagre strength wears thin, and she can’t keep fighting. She tries, tries once more to hit him, but it’s a pathetic effort. He seizes her wrists and pins her down, trapped and helpless, like an animal caught in a snare. Her sprained wrist protests the rough treatment. Her ribs ache. Tears sting at her eyes, unwanted and despised.

“I hate you,” she whispers. “I _hate_ you.”

“I’m not very fond of you either, right now,” he retorts. Vera closes her eyes and feels tears trickle down her cheeks. “When I came back here that morning and found the blood…when I realised what you’d done…” His breath is hot against her face, his mouth close to her ear. “I could’ve killed you then.” She shudders; he tightens his grip on her wrists, as if he thinks she’s going to start fighting him again. He was already holding her tight enough to bruise, so much strength and violence bound up in him. Her bad wrist _aches_. “I could kill you now, for what you did,” he says darkly. There’s pain in his voice, as well as anger, and Vera still doesn’t understand _why_. What is it that drives his anger, his pain? That there was a child he didn’t know about; that she destroyed it; that she risked her own life? Any of these reasons might fit, but he’s giving her nothing to work with. And held tight as she is, pressed against the wall and his head tucked near to her shoulder, he’s too close for her to see his face. She can read some of his masks, knows some of his tells. After these long months together, she might be able to glean a little from his face. But he gives her nothing. He hides his face from her and keeps her trapped between his warm body at her front and the cold wall at her back.

“Let go of me,” she demands. “Let _go_ of me, you bastard!”

“Oh, my parents were respectably married,” Philip snaps, “which is more than can be said of yours.”

It’s a low blow, aimed at hurting her, and it works. She’s never said it outright, never speaks of her background and origins at all if she can help it, but he knows she was brought up in a home. He knows she wasn’t an orphan. There are other explanations, of course, but only a few, and Philip is astute. He has put the pieces together and formed a perfect picture. No doubt he’s reserved it to use as a weapon against her, this shameful truth that she’s lived with all her life. Even now, angry and frightened as she is, Vera feels that old, familiar sense of humiliation seeping across her skin, making her flush. Sins of the mother, carried on her shoulders every step of the way. She’s wondered, sometimes, if that’s why she is the way she is. A bastard child twisted by her mother’s misdeeds.

“I _hate_ you,” she says again. It’s pathetic; it’s weak. She revolts at herself, furious at being reduced to this, and finds one last spark of fight. She uses the wall as leverage, pushes against it, lifts her leg and bends her knee. She hits his thigh, not his groin. He grunts, irritated but not hurt. But Vera is hurt; the movement twisted something inside her, pulled at some unhealed injury, and it chokes her breath in her throat. For a few moments she sees stars as pain envelopes her. Philip curses, pulls away from her, takes his hands from her wrists. She sags against the wall and lets her knees buckle, but she doesn’t hit the floor. Philip catches her, grasps her elbows and eases her fall. She doesn’t know why he’s so careful of her, if he’s so angry with her that he says he could kill her. She doesn’t understand him at all, it seems.

The pain begins to ease; she can breathe again.

“C’mon,” Philip says roughly. “Into bed. You need rest.”

Vera gives a hoarse, mirthless chuckle. “Rest,” she echoes. “I can’t _rest_.” He’s still holding her elbows, his hands so warm through her blouse, his touch so gentle. He’s killed people with these hands. A few minutes ago he’d held her hard against the wall, hard enough that bruises are already blooming on her wrists. And yet now he’s careful with her. Now, when she risks a glance at him, she sees a shade of concern in his stormy face. Now, even when she tries to shake him off, his touch remains gentle.

“No,” he mutters. “Maybe not. But you’re getting into that bed one way or another, Vera. So am I carrying you, or will you go of your own accord?” There’s iron in his voice, a grim determination that she knows will not be defeated. She won’t give him the satisfaction of carrying her, though. She gets up by herself, with only a steadying hand from him to help her, and goes to the bed. There’s a clean nightdress under the pillow, and she strips while he watches, his gaze burning into her back as she discards her blouse and skirt. She keeps her back straight, her shoulders relaxed; she’s determined that Philip will not see how keenly she feels the vulnerability of her bare skin. She reaches back to undo her bra, but suddenly Philip is there, knocking aside her hands and undoing the clasp. Then he touches her, two fingers tracing a path across her back and up to her shoulder. Vera shivers.

“This bruise,” he says, and then falls silent. Vera knows there’s bruising there, of course, though she’s not been able to get more than a glimpse of it in a mirror. It will have faded a little now, that bruise, like all the others, but her skin is pale and even yellowing bruises still show starkly. “I’d kill anyone who bruised you like this,” Philip says eventually. His head must be bowed low, close to her; she can feel his breath on her shoulders. “Do you understand that?” His hands clasp her shoulders, and then slide up to her neck. Vera stands still, barely even daring to breathe. He’s not choking her, nothing like enough pressure to choke her, but his hands close around her neck. A heavy, deliberate noose.

She finds her voice. “Take your hands off me,” she says, as coolly as she can manage.

His thumbs press against the back of her neck, either side of her spine. “Do you understand that,” he repeats. “Do you even have the slightest idea of what I’d do to anyone who hurt you? Or why?”

“Let me go,” Vera says through gritted teeth. Philip sighs, smoothes his hands down her neck and shoulders, and steps away from her. She removes her bra and knickers and pulls the nightdress from under the pillow. But it’s not a proper nightdress; it’s one of his shirts, one that she’s long since claimed as her own. Because he likes seeing her in it. Because she likes to feel surrounded and embraced by him. She can’t remember if that’s what she’d left there, three weeks ago when she’d made the bed. Perhaps Philip placed it there deliberately. But why? Why? He asks her if she knows why he claims he’d kill anyone who hurt her, but he won’t tell her why he’s so angry. If he just came out with it, gave her a reason, something to argue against…

But he hasn’t told her, and she’s been too much of a coward to ask. She has to know. She has to find out. They will be forever held in this moment, this awful pained fury, if one of them doesn’t find a way to push through it. She’s done too much to be willing to give up the fight now. She’s done too much to lose Philip through cowardice.

She pulls the shirt over her head and carefully lifts her hair from beneath the collar. “What would you have done,” she says, “if I’d told you?” It’s the closest she’s come to an admission, to acknowledging what they both know, but even now she prevaricates, dancing along that line between truth and lie. It’s close to an admission, but it isn’t one. She turns to look at him, lifts her chin defiantly. “What would you have done if I’d come to you and said I was going to have a baby?” she demands of him. “What would you have said?”

“We’ll never know now, will we?” Something she’s said, or the way she said it, seems to have caught his attention. There’s a bite to his words, but not as much malice as she expected. His eyes narrow slightly as he looks at her, a frown beginning to form on his face. “But I think the question is…what do you think I’d have said?”

Give him nothing, Vera tells herself. Hide it all away. He’s too close to the truth, with that question. She has to lie, but even now, even with this little spark of fire in her driving her onwards in this confrontation…even now, she’s afraid of lying to him. He always knows, that’s the problem. He _always_ knows when she isn’t telling the truth, and he’s told her before that he’s fed up of her lying to him. He’s angriest with her when she does. She is still in the dark about where his rage is coming from, now, but she knows it will only be worse if she tries to lie to him.

She wants to hide, to suffocate the truth deep inside her black heart, but he’s trained her well, apparently, because she also wants to offer a real answer to him. He’s always so pleased when she’s honest. But that won’t be enough, _can’t_ be enough, to erase his anger. If she tells him what she’d thought, when she’d discovered she was pregnant, he’ll still be angry about…whatever it is he’s angry about.

Philip’s gaze sharpens at her silence. “I see,” he murmurs. “So how did you think I’d react, hm? What did your twisted mind come up with to make you do something so…monstrous?”

Vera reels, physically and emotionally. “Monstrous?” she echoes, as the back of her legs hit the bed. He’s never called her that before. He’s never even hinted that he might have thought it. On the contrary, he’s always implied…no, more than implied. He’s always said that he likes her mind, the way she thinks, the way she _is_. Monstrous. Monster. All this, everything she’s done, the terror of a child causing a rift between them, and yet here they are, and he’s calling her monstrous. She can’t bear it. He was different; he was supposed to be different. Oh God help me, she thinks despairingly. What was the point of any of it if he thinks she’s a monster now?

She has to leave. She has to get out. She has to get away, but her vision is blurred, and when she tries to move past Philip, he grasps her arms and pushes her back, against the bed. She collapses onto it and doesn’t have the strength to try again. She presses her lips tightly together to keep from screaming at him. Monstrous, he called her. And she is; she is a monster. She’s always known it, but he’s made her believe he liked the monster. He made her feel safe. He made her think that maybe he…maybe he…

“Fuck,” Philip curses. “Fuck, Vera – I didn’t mean – Christ, darling, I –,” He falls to his knees before her, clasps her hands too tightly in his own. “I didn’t mean _you_ ,” he says. “It was just – it just came out –,” She can’t look at him. Her eyes are stinging with tears. He curses again, rests his head on her knee for a moment and exhales a hot breath against her skin. Monstrous, she hears. Monstrous. “Vera,” he says again, lifting his head. “Vera, listen to me, darling. Don’t disappear inside your head. Stay with me.” He kneels up and cups her face between his hands. She closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at him, but she can’t block up her ears. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he tells her. “Bad choice of words. I don’t think you’re a monster – I never have.”

She tries to smile; it ends up a grimace. “You should. I am.” She’s shivering, trembling, her whole body beginning to twitch from the chill in the air and from weariness. He leans forward, rests his forehead against hers. They breathe the same air. His hands are warm against her face, and she can’t quite bring herself to push him away. She is a monster, and this fight is not yet over, but oh, it feels so good to be touched so tenderly. She shivers and hot tears drip from the corners of her eyes and neither of them speak for a while.

“I was raised Catholic,” he says eventually. “A lot of hellfire and damnation, you know? Priests trying to make saints of us all. Been a long time since I thought about any of it, but I guess some things just…stick.” Vera thinks about the Christianity she was raised in, and she nods, just a tiny movement of her head. Thou shalt not kill. Yes, some things stick. She can’t blame him for that. “You’re not a monster,” Philip tells her, murmuring the words, as if he’s afraid she’ll spook if he speaks too loudly. “I swear, I don’t think that. You _know_ I – think you’re exquisite.”

“Even though I killed our child.”

The words slip out before she can stop them, and once spoken, there’s no taking them back. She can’t equivocate, can’t lie, can’t deny it. Six little words. The truth, at last, offered up unwittingly. Because he says she isn’t a monster; because she knows he is wrong.

Philip exhales sharply, and his hands fall away from her face. “Fuck,” he breathes. “You - _Christ_ , Vera.” He rises, paces away from her. Vera dries her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and wonders, inanely, if the cup of coffee on the chest of drawers is still hot enough to be worth drinking. Probably not. His coffee is always awful, anyway. The other cup, the shattered cup, is still in pieces on the floor. Coffee stains the wall in a splash and in long drips, down the wallpaper and onto the floor. It will be easier to get out of the carpet than blood. Her bare legs are covered in goose pimples, and she glances about to see if a dressing gown is anywhere near. But they’re both hanging on the back of the door, hers and Philip’s, and she isn’t sure her legs will support her right now.

Philip swings back around to face her, hand rubbing across his jaw, anger rising again. “Why did you do it?” he demands. “You owe me that much, at least.” He’s silent for a few moments, waiting for her to speak. Her breath catches in her throat when she inhales to reply, as if her body is warning her against the automatic lie that she wants to tell. His lip curls, as if her silence is answer enough. “I’m right, aren’t I? You got some idea in your head and it scared you so much that you thought the only thing to do was to – to deliberately harm yourself like that. To destroy our child.”

Something about that, about the words he uses, provokes her. She tucks her cold hands underneath her thighs and snaps: “Well, it can hardly be a surprise to you, that I’m capable of it.” Philip frowns at her, as if he’s confused. Vera lifts her chin and stares him down. “You’ve known I’m a murderer since the day we first met,” she reminds him. “You can’t claim to be shocked now.”

“That was different.”

“How?” she demands. “How was it different?” He opens his mouth to speak, but no words emerge. Triumph sparks inside; she has found something to attack him with. She doesn’t have to defend against this, against his hypocrisy. She’s killed a child before, or let one die, and he’s never had a problem with it. He’s known it since that first evening on Soldier Island, and he’d _liked_ it, finding that out about her. He’d liked peeling back the innocent mask and finding that, in her own way, she is just as wicked as him. And she’s confessed more to him since then, and killed again, and he’s embraced it all. He doesn’t get to claim a moral high ground now, because of this one crime. Not when he’s relished hearing about all the rest. Not when he’s got more blood on his hands than she does.

“It was different, and you know it,” Philip says, but she’s taken him off-guard. He runs a hand through his hair, settles his other hand on his hip. He looks disconcerted, as much as he ever does. His expression is still darkly furious, but he’s faltered, just a little. It’s barely perceptible, visible as much in what he doesn’t do as what he does. His jaw twitches, as if he’s clenching his teeth. “It’s different,” he repeats. “Don’t pretend it isn’t.”

“Why?” She rises, needing to be on her feet even though her body aches and something twinges, deep inside, in a reminder that she’s pushing herself too hard. She needs to be on her feet for this. “It wasn’t even a child yet,” she tells him. It’s cruel, saying that, and she knows it, but he’s been cruel to her today, and she won’t hold back now. “It wasn’t even as big as my hand,” she says, “so why is this so different from Cyril?”

“Because it was ours!” he bellows. It’s louder than he’s ever been, even in anger. He’s raised his voice before, almost to the point of shouting, but this…this is an explosion. This is a loss of control. It’s every bit as violent as his hands on her earlier, when he’d trapped her against the wall. The words hang in the air between them. She inhales but can’t find anything to say. Philip takes a deep breath, and another, and regains mastery over himself. “Because it was ours,” he says again. “Our child. Yours and mine. We made it and you…you destroyed it.”

Vera licks her lips. “You – you wouldn’t have _wanted_ it,” she whispers. Her mouth is dry; her voice is hoarse. “You couldn’t have wanted it, Philip.”

“Couldn’t I?” He gives a dry, grim chuckle. “Well, you made certain I didn’t have the chance to want it, didn’t you?” He tilts his head to one side a little and narrows his eyes, contemplative. “But you thought I wouldn’t want it,” he decides slowly. “You thought I’d…what, that I’d cut and run? That I’d despise the idea so much I’d leave you?” She suppresses a flinch, but that’s all she can do. She can’t deny it, she can’t pretend not to understand him. He sees through her masks even on her best days, and today is so very far from her best day. “You thought that. After all this time, after everything, you thought I’d leave?”

“I –,” She falters, falls silent. He shakes his head and turns away from her. “I’m sorry,” she offers at last, forcing the words out to combat his cool silence.

He scoffs. “Oh, are you, now? What about, Vera? About killing our child, or lying to me, or thinking I’d ever, _ever_ leave you?” Each accusation lands like a blow, and she hugs herself and wonders which crime is worst, in his eyes. Which should she apologise for? But she doesn’t mean it, and they both know it. She will only be truly sorry for what she’s done if he leaves her now. Otherwise…well, otherwise the price will have been worth it, to ensure he stays. To ensure she keeps what she wants. Oh, she’s sorry she damaged herself, sorry she’s angered him, but in the end the truth is that faced with the same problem again, the same decision, she’d do exactly the same again. Because whatever he says now is coloured by what’s happened, and it changes nothing. Nothing. One way or another, a child would have driven him from her.

“I’d have loved any child of ours,” Philip says. He turns back around, looks straight at her. “D’you understand that? I’d have loved this child, because it was _ours_. Yours and mine.”

She lifts her hands, presses them against her aching head. “Maybe you would have,” she says dully. “Maybe. But I wouldn’t.” He doesn’t say anything; she’s surprised him. “I’m a monster,” she mutters. “I’m a monster and I don’t – I don’t work the way other people do.”

“Vera –,” He takes a step towards her; she flings an arm out, to ward him off, and he stops.

“I don’t. You know that I don’t!” She wipes her sleeve across her damp eyes and pleads with him for understanding. He knows her so well, he understands her so well, and surely he will realise the truth in what she’s saying now. “I don’t care like other people. I don’t understand friendship or compassion or – or love, I don’t feel love, not really, not the way other people do, and I wouldn’t have loved a child even if it was ours, and eventually you’d have hated me for not loving it!”

They look at each other for a long time. She can’t tell what he’s thinking. Her thoughts, she’s sure, are easy enough for him to read. Damn him for being able to do that, for stripping her bare until she’s nothing but bones, utterly exposed to him. Damn him for making her trust him so much. Damn him to hell.

“And you didn’t want that,” Philip says at last. “You didn’t want me to hate you.” It isn’t a question. She nods anyway, a jerky movement of her head. “So what do you want, Vera?”

Blood thrums in her ears. “You,” she whispers. “I want you.”

“Why?” he asks gently. Just one word, spoken coaxingly, like he’s holding out his hand and waiting, patiently, for her to take it. So gentle. The anger and the pain smoothed away, leaving something more tender. Something unnameable, something she’s seen in him before and has made her dare to hope that perhaps he is more than fond of her, perhaps it’s more than lust and appreciation, perhaps it’s…

His tenderness, his softness, makes her give up, at last, the final secret she has kept from him.

“Because I love you,” she says.

And then she starts crying again, fat tears that burn her eyes, sobs that choke her throat. Philip crowds near to her, wraps his arms around her and holds her close to him, but she can’t stop crying. He murmurs soothing nonsense to her and Vera cries, and they stand like that for a long, long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter/coda will be posted tomorrow.


	4. Epilogue

Eventually Philip coaxes her into bed. It’s not that she needs much coaxing, more that she seems to have lost, for now, any inclination to instigate movement. He pulls back the blankets and eases her down into the bed. He pauses to take off his shoes and belt, then he slides in beside her. She turns onto her side and he takes her up on the silent invitation, moulding himself against her back and legs. His head rests partly on her shoulder, his face almost hidden in the curve of her neck. His arm is a welcome weight across her middle. Their legs are tangled. Vera has long since acknowledged to herself that she loves to be held so by Philip, cradled by him. It has always made her feel cherished, and now is no exception. She puts her arm over his and lets his warmth leech into her.

“When I found you,” he says at last, “I thought you were going to die. I thought I was taking you to the hospital just to have you die there.” Somebody else, Vera knows, would apologise now. They would apologise for doing something so reckless, and they would mean it. Is she sorry? She’s sorry she scared him, but she’d done what she thought she had to do. She isn’t remorseful, not the way another person would be. So she says nothing, and Philip continues. “There are some things that never leave you. Some sights. Seeing you like that…” His arm tightens around her. “Don’t ever do that to me again. I need you to trust me not to leave you, Vera.”

“I do,” she whispers. He hums an unconvinced sound, and she tries again. “I do. I do, Philip, I swear.” She tries to wriggle around in his embrace, to face him, and he allows it. They rearrange themselves, chest to chest and face to face. Vera makes the promise again and Philip kisses her gently. He kisses her mouth and the tip of her nose and her cheeks. “You were right,” she admits under these tender ministrations. “I was afraid. Oh, Philip, I was so afraid.” She isn’t ashamed to admit it, now. She knows, somehow, that Philip won’t scorn her for it. She isn’t certain how she knows, but she does. She trusts him to hold her fragile heart the way he’s holding her battered body: carefully, affectionately. She trusts him. She’s told him the truth and he’s still here, and admitting her fear is no longer impossible.

“I know,” he soothes. “I know. But I’m never going to leave you, Vera. Never. Nobody’s going to take me away from you.” His eyes glitter at her. “Not even you.” She accepts the criticism, the vocal acknowledgement of the fear that’s dogged her over the last three weeks. “D’you understand why, darling?” he asks her. “Do you know, now?”

“I think so,” she says. “But tell me?” Perhaps she shouldn’t need to hear the words, but she does. She needs to hear him say it, to know that she hasn’t been imagining it, hasn’t been hoping in a hopeless situation. She will trust him, she will do her utmost to remove any last lingering doubts about why he’s still with her even after all this…but she needs to hear it. At least this once.

The corner of Philip’s mouth lifts in a slight smile. “I love you,” he says. Simple and direct, as if he’s commenting on the weather or telling her he’s burnt the toast. As if it’s a truth that he’s lived with for months, one that he’s perfectly happy to share with her. Vera takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, and Philip presses his forehead against hers. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to say that,” he sighs.

“Why didn’t you say it before?”

“You would have run screaming.” He chuckles when she tries to protest, and pushes her onto her back, hitching his leg over her knees and propping himself up on the bed with an elbow. She’s trapped beneath him, but she’s exactly where she wants to be. Her ribs ache from moving, but she pushes it aside. She’s due more painkillers, she’s fairly sure, but the pills are downstairs, and she can’t bear the idea of Philip leaving, even for a few minutes. Not now. Not now he’s told her he loves her; not now she truly knows and understands that she’s safe with him. He gazes down at her and Vera lifts a hand, cups his face and strokes her thumb across his cheekbone. “You would have run,” he says. “You’d have spooked like a rabbit in headlights and then gone racing for cover. You weren’t ready to hear it. I had to wait for you.”

“…No,” Vera has to agree. “No, I wasn’t ready.” She wouldn’t have believed him, either. Not without the sort of proof she’s now been given, the proof she provoked by her actions. But it isn’t a comfortable thought, the idea that it’s her own fault she’s lived so long with her doubts and insecurities, so she leaves it be. “Do you remember,” she says instead, “on Soldier Island, asking me what I’d wanted? You meant what I wanted so much I would let a boy drown.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve always had to fight for what I want.”

“I know.” Philip glances down, at her abdomen. His lips are pursed and there’s a crease between his eyebrows as he looks at her, and for once his thoughts are easy to read. Vera regrets, suddenly. A sharp pang of it hits her. She regrets making him look like this. “I haven’t forgiven you for it,” he says. “This conversation isn’t done. I’m still here, I’m not going to leave you, but this…this was…” He shakes his head. For once, words fail him.

“I understand,” Vera says softly. “I never meant to hurt you, Philip. But I thought, one way or another, that I’d lose you. And I can’t do that.” She slides her hand down his cheek, down to the open collar of his shirt. She grips it tight in her fist. “I can’t lose you,” she repeats. “You’re all I want.”

“I think I got that message,” he says with a roll of his eyes. But he’s smiling; his irritated tone of voice is more for show than anything else. He lowers his head to kiss her. It’s a proper kiss, the first they’ve shared in weeks. It’s affection, it’s lips and tongues and even teeth, Philip nipping at her lower lip when she wraps her arms around his neck and tries to pull him down on top of her. “No, darling,” he remonstrates. “Your ribs.”

“Bother my ribs,” she mutters crossly. He’s right, of course. Her ribs ache from all her exertions since returning home, and there’s a nagging throb in her head that warns her she needs rest and quiet, for a while at least. And, too, there’s the wound inside her. She’s been warned to refrain from sexual activity for now, and anyway her whole vagina, inside and out, feels tender. Philip on top of her like this, his weight held by the bed, is fine. He causes no pressure on any of her injuries. But if he were to come down onto her properly, as she wants, it would be too painful. “I do hurt a bit,” she admits, because there’s no longer any danger in showing weakness. There’s no danger now she’s admitted the secret she’s been keeping buried. She has nothing else to hide from him and, knowing he loves her, she has no reason to be afraid.

“I’ll get your pills.”

He kisses her again, so tenderly that Vera thinks she might break from it. Then he rolls off the bed, and rises before she can do more than reach out for him.

“Don’t go,” she entreats. Philip looks down at her, and Vera fights the urge to hide herself away. She trusts him, she reminds herself. She’d trusted him even before he’d spoken those three words that she’s longed to hear. She had lain in that hospital bed, the very first day, knowing that he cared and trusting that he wouldn’t leave her.

She trusts him.

So she doesn’t have to pretend she isn’t anxious now. She can have faith that although Philip will see her fear, he’ll also see that she knows it to be unfounded. He’ll see that she is wholeheartedly fighting those instincts that tell her not to take anyone at their word. Instincts that still tell her not to trust anyone. A lifetime’s worth of ingrained habits, forged through necessity, aren’t easily discarded, but she’s _trying_. She’s trying, and she isn’t hiding. That’s the most important thing, she thinks. She isn’t hiding. She isn’t lying.

“I’m just going downstairs to the kitchen,” Philip says. “To get your pills. And some water. I’ll be a couple of minutes.” There’s no censure in his voice. He looks at her until she meets his eyes, and then he nods. He sees. He understands. She nods back, and settles more comfortably on the bed. Philip lingers for a few moments, bends over and tucks the blankets close around her. “You know this conversation isn’t finished,” he says, repeating his earlier words. “I’m still furious with you, Vera.”                                          

“I know.” Vera submits to his ministrations, letting him fuss over the blankets and the pillows and even tuck her hair behind her ears. His fingers linger on her skin, sliding down the line of her jaw and then to her lips, where he rests his forefinger. Not silencing her, just touching. Vera kisses his fingertip. “I know,” she murmurs. There are more fights to have. He’ll want to know exactly what she did, and she won’t want to tell him everything, because she is still who she is, and lying is second nature to her. They’ll fight about that; she loves him and trusts him but she can’t _change_ , not in fundamentals. No more than he can.

She thinks perhaps they will spend the rest of their lives together like this: happy, in their own particular way, but full of passion. Full of fire. Fighting each other and fucking each other until it kills them both. It’s a rather tantalising prospect.

“But not today,” she says, as Philip takes his finger from her lips. “Today I just want you to hold me.”

He huffs a laugh, and straightens up. “I’ll hold on tight,” he tells her. He means two things at once, and she’s warmed by both. “But pills first. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Alright.” She watches him cross the room, but calls out just as he reaches the door. “Philip?” He turns back, an eyebrow raised, all amused patience. “I do, you know,” she says. She can’t quite manage the words again, not yet, but she wants him to hear it, and she knows he’ll understand.

Philip smiles, just a little. “I know, darling,” he assures her. “I do, too.” Then he leaves the bedroom, and Vera curls up in a nest of blankets and waits for his return.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's waited so long for this installment of the 'verse. I'm really grateful to everyone for sticking with it and being so patient; it's lovely to know that there are other people as fascinated with Vera and Philip as I am!
> 
> I've had a number of people wondering if this is the final story - and in fact, originally, I thought it would be. But there are more stories to tell. This is the end of the beginning of 'And Then There Were Two', not the end of the series. There will be more. As ever, I can't guarantee when it will come, but there will be more, and hopefully before too long.

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning:
> 
> This fic deals with a character undergoing a self-abortion. No graphic details of method or results is discussed. There is discussion/mention of pain and blood.


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